


Into the Void

by princemiskeen



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, Multi, NSFW, i have a lot of feelings about the twunk magician, more like overtones amirite ladies, why are you booing him? he's right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-05 01:28:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17909417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princemiskeen/pseuds/princemiskeen
Summary: Your name is Ghania.You are a hotheaded, talented heir to your people's legacy, natural and supernatural, and you've taken a forked path into an unknown that only has a Magician's light for guidance. You two have known each other since you were children, and the story that's played out before both of your eyes has been long and foggy. You live in self-imposed exile. A non-chronological collection of the winding path through the trials set out for you - you have to find out if these things were pre-determined, or it's all just blind chaos. It's impossible to know which of these options will set you free. A Magician promises you that you're not alone.





	1. The Magician

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: These won't be following any specific plot yet, just a collection of stories to help emphasize the relationships that The Apprentice is forming with the people around them, platonic, romantic, and the shit inbetween. It's not just boning, but there will probably be boning lmao. Pls enjoy

You are Ghania. 

A fierce, sharp-tongued magician with enough bravery, enough gumption to be a force of nature. You come from a nomadic, matriarchal tribe that has left you with intricate tattoos etched into your face, down your arms, and onto the backs of your hands and fingers. The symbols represented centuries of tradition, signifying things like fortune, love, and health. Magic older than you can fathom is woven into these designs. You are the scion of a bloodline that stretches back an age. You also have one hell of a right hook.

Your smart mouth gets you in trouble. Often.

You are in love with a wizard with hair like starlight. He’s soft, smells like cardamom and incense. He holds you at night like you’re made of rubies. Over the years, you both took parallel and winding paths to find each other again and again. It’s been clunky and wrought with stress, but there’s a groove that you two have been living in that you have no intention of leaving anytime soon. You know him to be cagey, so you’ve been careful. But he looks at you with far more intensity pulsing in his eyes lately … it makes you believe him more. 

It’s a lot to process.

One night, it manifests in detail. You’re running down an alleyway, cobblestones pounding into the soles of your feet. For the moment – you have no idea what you’re running from. Only a voice, true and clear that tells you to run as if your gods are setting your heels on fire with their own hands.

In the distance, you see a figure. You know it, you know every inch of your wizard. You cry out his name, stretch a hand out; he’ll know what to do, how to stop this pulsing in your veins, this terror in your heart. Still he gets farther and farther and he’s only a silhouette in the shadows of the alleyway. Sometimes framed against crates or overturned carts, sometimes against the city walls. Sometimes a soft jingle of the jewelry that would hang from his taut, long body.

Your eyes sting with tears, you slip through an overgrown park. 

You are alone. You have always been alone.

In one swift rip, you’re awake. Startled, you sit up and process the empty hut. The embers from the fire have died down, and you’ve been wrapped in a cocoon of blankets that overheated you into an uncomfortable sweat in your sleep. It sticks to every inch of you, and all your tired mind can think to do is scramble out of the nest.

It was a nightmare.

It’s nearly dawn, and the soft colors in the sky say that the sun is on its way over. In an exhausted frenzy, you grab a discarded blouse. It smells like him and it hits you hard. The smell is anchoring, and brings you closer to a waking reality than you were moments ago. In your mind you can process the empty hut.

Fuck, you think. And you leave. You know you probably shouldn’t, naked under the loose-fitting blouse and barefoot into the woods like a wild child – but you need fresh air or you will certainly lose your mind.

The early morning wind is a godsend against the sweat on your body and you twine your body to show the welcome. You’re not overheated anymore, and you can think much more clearly. It also hardens your nipples into little diamonds, and that’s not an unpleasant sensation this morning. In the back of your mind, you wonder if there’s any coffee tucked away in the hut somewhere. Or maybe a nice tea blend of chamomile and peppermint or something.

Anything to calm your pounding heart.

Like a ghost, he walks into sight after another beat. Your usual defenses of dry humor and sarcasm aren’t really working right this morning, still spooked from the nightmare. So you just walk toward him.

Asra tilts his head, stopping in his tracks to drink you in for a fleeting moment. He’s always astute, though, and knows you – he sees the distress woven into your face, into every step you take. So he opens his mouth and he asks, “Are you alright?”

“I had a nightmare,” you tell him. There’s no use hiding it. Asra has told you a million times that as much as you want to pretend, you’re shitty at hiding your feelings. Especially since you feel them so very strongly.

The wizard reaches out a tentative hand. Your relationship is new, he is still hesitant to touch you without asking. So you lean into the warmth of his hand and melt into his touch. An arm snakes around your waist and pulls you close and in your ear he says, “I’m sorry. I was getting some food for breakfast, but I should have stayed.”

“No,” you murmur, your fingers starting to dig into the fabric of his shirt with each passing second. “You can’t always be there for me. It’d be unfair to think that.”

The both of you are still drowning in a honeymoon phase that you are only just beginning to realize has happened before. The Magician, who you’ve known and you’ve spent so much time with – even longer than you can remember. That is what terrifies you; who was he before? Did you love him like this? Did it drive you so very mad just like this? It restokes the flame of panic in the pit of your stomach at the real possibility of his disappearing again.

He tilts your head up to force you to get lost in the bejeweled plates he called eyes. It deeply upsets you how gorgeous he is. You try to power through it on most days but moments like these, when you’re close enough to see every eyelash and the lovely curve of his mouth – how the hell are you supposed to think straight? Village elders warned you of the Magician’s coming, spoke in hissed whispers of his terrible powers.

Powers not of this world, your aunty in all her (often very inappropriate) wisdom had said. You must protect yourself from his gaze.

“I want to be,” he tells you, bringing you rushing back to the moment with a snap. And you can see and you know that he means it. It’s intuition that you’ve always had. Some more family magic choked with history that makes your head spin. History that forbade this sort of pairing. There is a whisper of danger in the air but you ignore it. It’s too easy to ignore.

Not that you intend to give up entirely.

“You’re here now,” and you mean that. Just being this close is enough to fill your head with the sort of brain fog that makes you feel more like a beast than a person. He shudders with a coming breeze, gathering you into his arms like you weighed nothing and carrying you off into the hut. The heat that comes off of him is always so dizzying to be pressed against. Your thoughts travel south and into the gutter, and his response is taking a generous handful of your ass in his right hand.

You gasp in his ear, soft and content. Your toes curl, teeth digging into your lower lip when the throbbing starts. In many ways, you consider yourself an independent spirit. You were taught to depend on your wits to navigate the chaos of this world by your ancestors. 

But the Magician exists in another place for you. He’s safe. He’s a home you never knew you were looking for, but found again and again. So when he wants to comfort you, to apologize in a way he assumed you would believe him … you let him. Saints, how can you deny him?

In a daze, he lays you down on the furs and replaces the firewood, lighting it easily with winding magic. You stare at up at him in silence, breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. The throbbing doesn’t stop, sending shooting bolts up your skin. The trousers he wears hugs his peachy ass so nicely.

“I’m sorry,” he tells you, pressing kisses into your knuckles. There is sincerity in his beautiful eyes but there is also a growing impish delight. You’re instantly suspicious of his supposedly good intentions. “How can I show you? Hm? How can I show you how distressing it is to think you woke up alone and frightened, without me?”

You twine like Faust into the furs. The soft texture tickles your skin and you let out a whine, starting to ache for the heat from his body. Just to touch him. “Asra. Please.”

His hands slide smooth and easy up your legs and along the curves of your thighs, fabric bunching together in his wake. It starts the old fire in your veins like a dependable furnace. You have loved before, but not like the Magician. The Magician is your first. It’s why your aunties disapproved, but never tried to stop you when he offered to make you both vanish into the arid emptiness. 

His voice is low, albeit a little amused when he says, “You’re reckless for going out without even smalls on.”

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” you reply.

Your people would maintain that you were bewitched, whisked away into the night by a beautiful djinn. You always felt that was unfair, always gloriously choosing the seconds you spend under his touch. And something in your heart would always think that he went beyond the boundaries of a djinn. Something more. Always something more.

It was long ago when you realized too much time was wasted spent trying to understand what this Magician was. All you can do now is trust that he will tell you everything in time. To have faith in the desperate pleas of love and devotion whispered into your ear at night. If your aunties were right, he would lead you into the night with no family to protect you. There is no telling if he will hold your hand the entire time. One whim could send you cascading into the unknown with no anchors.

He sees your mind wandering into the miasma of the past, the markings all across your body flashing momentarily with the emotions locked in there, and he brings your hand to his face, nuzzling into the palm of your hand for a moment. He practically purrs for attention, looking at you through half-lidded eye that are molten hot.

Asra’s touch is deliberately slow, teasing, and he says, “You’re so stubborn. You could have caught a cold … but still, you’re so ready for me already, hm?”

A small whine escapes you. This is unfair. Your legs shift, your thighs pressing together to find some relief from the building stress. “Would you tease me so early in the morning?”

“No, you’re right,” and the Magician pouts with a flash of sympathy and throws a knee to straddle you. The smooth palms of his hand slide up the curves of your body and plays idly with the peaks of your nipples as he drinks in the sight of you beneath him. So uncharacteristically submissive. You feel the rush of adrenaline it shoots into his veins to see you wriggling so soft and so beautiful, your lips and your cheeks reddening to such a gorgeous flush of pink when he has such clear memories of your bravery in battle, your warrior’s spirit, your lion’s courage.

“We have this for ourselves,” he tells you, pressing your foreheads together. “Shall I show you how perfect I think you are? Mm?”

You open your eyes. You look him dead in the eyes, a part of you that he has always adored – your fearlessness. “I just want you.”

With one gentle tug, he has you in his lap, craning you up so he can look up at you through his lashes again, peppering kisses along your jawline, the swoop of your clavicle. No corner remains untouched. He murmurs his adoration into every inch of your soft, flushed skin in a mother tongue you can’t understand, fingers digging into the skin of your back to keep you anchored there until he was through with you; and there always hung the promise of that never happening swirled into the curves of his affections. Mewling sounds escape from your lips and he wraps you up in a stormy kiss that he can pour all his wordless feelings into.

Ancestors. Fuck, you love him and it’s difficult to feel like you won’t explode from that realization again and again. You can’t tell if the tinges of danger in your being so melded together is tantalizing or worrying, but once again, you can’t begin to bring yourself to care in the moment.

Your mind stops racing when his fingers slip inside of you and there is just blank and white hot. Breathlessly, you tuck yourself into the crook of his shoulder, keening into him with every crook of his long, practiced fingers. The Magician is better at keeping his composure than you, and you feel his wicked smile when he brings his lips to your ear and he says, “You are the angel I found in the middle of the desert. Your people say that I bewitched you, my love … but it was the other way around, wasn’t it? It’s like a madness. Perhaps I should ask your Elders what you’ve done to me, hm? How should I know I’m not under your spell?”

“You’re such a bastard,” you whisper through clenched teeth, already feeling like you could come apart at the seams. Your strangled tone is too choked with adoration to sound as threatening as you want it to be. He can feel how much you love him with every move you make. Asra stared into you long enough for you to be known.  
One finger becomes two, and your movements – normally so controlled, the dancer’s poise that you’ve become so proud of over the years – become more savage, more desperate under his merciless watch, riding along with his fingers.

And he enjoys every moment of it, playing a secret rhythm in and out with blinding precision. Though, you know in the back of your mind that the tent growing beneath them both could only go ignored for so long.

“My fierce one,” he whispers like a prayer into the curve of your breast, raking his teeth across the prickling flesh before using his other hand to grip your throat and pull you to his eye level with a rough jerk. He always wants to watch you come apart, snowy eyebrows shooting up in morbid delight when he finally registers the tomcat smile split across your face. By sheer force of will, as if only to one-up that arrogant smirk plastered on his beautiful face, you push back the orgasm and taunt him.

Oh, how you loved to make things difficult for him. And he loved that even now, right on the edge of tumbling into oblivion by his hand, you still had the fucking nerve to challenge his control directly. No, your eyes say to him, fuck you.

The grip on your neck tightens into a vice, stopping just enough breathing not to hurt you but to strain your resolve to fight him. He pulls you so close that your foreheads touch, and he bores into your eyes with sinister promises burning in the pupils of his own if you didn’t tow the line. Asra sucks his teeth, curses at you, and he tells you in a low, thick voice, as one finger swirled in a circle round your clit, “Stubborn. You were always so bull-headed. I could fuck you sore if I wanted to. And still you fight me, Rani. Is that what you want?”

When the cries start to pick up again and the power slips like silt from your hands, your fingers start to desperately knot into the puffy, errant white curls on his head, rocking your hips into his eager grasp. His name is a benediction on your lips and he shivers at the contact of how much you want him inside and all over. 

“Such a bastard,” you tell him again, but it’s starting to go wild in your brain again. “I love you. Please, I–!”

“As do I, with every breath I breathe,” like a prayer he says that into your slick skin, but you when you pull back to look at him properly again he’s still smiling like a damn shark. A chill settles in your stomach. “But you can’t sweet talk your way out of a punishment. Not like this. I could snap you like a twig like this. It’s too easy.”

“Promises, promises,” you tell him, an almost delirious laugh escaping you. He’s right but he won’t get that out of you, cruelly ripping his fingers from inside of you. You cry out at the loss of him so close to the blessed end.

Asra cocks an eyebrow. He accepts the challenge by languidly flipping you onto your back and pushing you hard into the furs, dragging the tips of his nails across the exposed, sensitive nerves on your belly. A shaking, breaking sigh slips out of you without warning at the way he looks at you. He looks like he could eat you at a moment’s notice. “I need to figure out how to shut that beautiful mouth, don’t I?”

He grips your chin. Hard. Your lips pucker and pout and he sucks on your lower lip until it’s red and raw, leaning down until he is all you can process in the world around you. There are beginnings of his magic clouding your brain even more. Worlds swirl and swirl and they seem suspended in this liminal place.

One of your hands reaches out desperately for another anchor and your fingers curl wildly into a cushion. The Magician slithers into the spot behind your ear, brushing kisses with his teeth, canines worrying little love bites into your neck. You are drunk on the way that your magic mingles together. “Prideful creature. You gorgeous demon. I’ll see to it that you can’t think of anything but me inside of you.”

“Asra,” you cry out when he sheathes himself to the hilt with no further warning.

He starts off with a slow, steady motion, taking deep breaths to steady himself from losing his own grip. No, he rarely wants to come first unless you specifically ask. Usually he wants to watch. The little voyeur. Not once does he let you look away, let you seek shelter when oblivion inevitably came crashing down by hiding your face from his relentless fucking gaze.

“Tell me that you love me,” the Magician demands in his melodic, singsong voice. When you hazily refuse, he grips your hips all the harder, slowing the rhythm of his thrusts to a maddening crawl. He grips your jaw again with one free hand, squeezing and forcing you to look at him. “Say it.”

“I love you,” you all but sob, keening into every move of his hips when he picks up again. Oh, Gods, this can’t go on forever can it–?

“Wherever in the world you go,” he tells you in between every moment of the wet noises the both of you make, every individual thrust, he makes you understand, “I will always find you. I would move the stars themselves if it meant keeping you safe. Do you understand me?”

You nod a silent, shaking affirmation but that’s not enough for him, and he growls, gripping you even tighter. Enough to leave bruises, but the pain tastes like sweet wine. “Ghania. Do you understand me? Look at me and answer.”

“Yes,” you weep, at the gates of your limits, strangled under the realization that he means every word, every syllable spoken like an unbreakable vow. Claws of madness are starting to sink into her brain. “Please please Asra I want to–!”

“No,” he tells you, his teeth starting to clench at the way you open and close around him. “No, you don’t finish until I say.”

The curse comes out more feral than you intend. “Fuck y–!” 

He shuts you up swiftly with a hungry kiss, roughly pinning you even harder into the ground by your wrists. His hands are like shackles and for the life of you, you can’t begin to overpower him. He is still inside of you, his movements still intent on letting you suffer in purgatory for a little while longer. Like an intricate composition, he moves in and out as if following an aria in his head.

“Beg,” he orders you simply – sweetly. “Beg me for release and I might give it you, but you have to be nice. Can you do that for me, fierce thing? Mm?”

A wave of rebellion crashes through you and when you meet his eyes a second time, he’s surprised to see the fire still burning there. You, however, are much more impatient than him and this is beginning to drive you up the wall. “Ugh. Fucking make me, you sadist.”

The controlled dominance shatters like china. Now it’s an open confrontation, and Asra has no intention of losing. You can see the shift in his eyes, the darker edges of his sweet personality making way for the force that’s always lived in this fragrant Magician. His beautiful face a darkened canvas, he grabs you by the thick tendrils of dark hair on your head in one smooth, tight fist and pulls you back to sit up, forcing you to look at him as he pumps into you. He’s so lithe it’s easy to forget how strong he actually he is. 

Asra tilts your head as he please.

If he’s close, you can’t tell. Your normal powers go into chaos whenever he touches you like this, and he knows it. He fucks you harder and harder and through clenched teeth in your ear he asks you, “Will you keep fighting me? Or will you beg for it to end? Hm? You can’t have both.”

It’s too much to keep the fight up for long. He can feel it coiling like a poised dragon in your belly, threatening to come out at any moment, and he’s milking the impending victory. He knows you hate being bested. He’ll show you what it means to be arrogant with him, to buck at him like a stag. He loves your ferocity but all he can think is how to collar it and you feel that searing hot desire creeping up. 

Finally, you begin to break for him into beautiful little pieces, toes curling when you breathe out, “Please.”

“What was that?” he asks, taking a playful bite of your earlobe. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Please,” you cry out, fingers digging into his neck as he holds you there and keeps the doors locked. “Please please Asra I can’t fucking stand it, please I’m sorry for fighting–”

And then he laughs like bells in your ear, breathlessly kissing you before he says, “I suppose I have been cruel with you, haven’t I, my love? You’re so cute… I get carried away.”

The Magician murmurs a come for me in the space behind your ear and oblivion all but grabs you by the ankles and swings you into every available surface. You keen into his sweaty body, gripping his hair as the cries rip from your throat and your thighs close around his cock, squeezing for dear life, stars popping up in your vision. His own end comes hard and fast and when the last of him is spilled inside of you, he pulls out to leave you a bitten and flushed carcass on the furs.

Asra stands over you with a predatory smile, breathlessly looking up at him, covered in the evidence of his attentions, aching and sore. The morning sun creeps through the curtains and kisses his gleaming skin. You can’t think straight, the combination of both of you dripping out from between your legs and down your thighs in a display you can’t care to correct.

Your body trembles, reduced to jelly. It was only once but it took most of your energy out of you in a bright burst of light. There is a split moment where he just … watches you laying there trying to catch your breath, to wriggle some life back into your limbs.

As if on cue, the door clicks open and Muriel surveys the scene he’s just stumbled upon, his face quickly inflating to a deep red. It’s funny to have been able to witness his analysis. You’re too freshly fucked to have the capacity to be embarrassed, but still you curl yourself weakly into the blankets to have some semblance of dignity left. As if that was even possible. The room reeks of sex.

Asra is unfazed, standing to his feet with a sly smile. “Ghania is such a picture like this, don’t you think?”

“Uh,” Muriel stutters, unsure where to let his eyes rest.

“Sorry to embarrass you, I can never help myself with this one,” he tells the giant with a smile lacking in any real pity and a shrug, turning back to look at your limp form with a glimmer of pride in his eyes. “Could you step out for a moment, Muriel? I’ll start making breakfast soon.”

“Whatever,” he grumbles, vanishing just as quickly as he appeared.

Asra is beside you in a flash and he lets one lazy digit trail along your inner thigh, swirling circles in the juice dripping idly down your skin and he says, “I was tempted to have him watch me fuck you again, but he’s not quite used to you yet. Mm. Soon, though. I can see how he watches you.” 

Everything about that statement was dizzying but you can’t help but repeat, “Again?”

“Did you think you were only going to come once?” Asra laughs at you, as if the very notion was straight out of the funnies. When his voice drops an octave lower, it shoots a shiver up your spine like lightning and a truly wicked grin splits across his face, “I’m going to make you breakfast. We’ll eat, and then I’m going to fuck you again. And again. ‘Til your body doesn’t move until I tell it to. Until you beg me with that lovely mouth as many times until I’m satisfied to make it stop. I suppose it makes me selfish … but I want you for myself for the moment.”

“Your cruel streak is going to be the death of me,” you tell him, reaching for the glass of water on a nearby nightstand in a desperate attempt to ignore the delicious shudder that erupts through your nerves at such a threat.

Asra kisses the space between your shoulder blades with another delicate laugh, taking two generous handfuls of your ass as you lay there, depleted on your stomach and floating in the afterglow. He stands to his feet and starts to rummage through the sack that had been thrown over his shoulder. “Can you blame me? Look at you. If I wasn’t so hungry I’d take you again right now.”

You start to shift up, on impulse you want to offer your help to prepare breakfast but he all but pushes you back where you were with the look that he shoots you. “I appreciate you wanting to help,” he says, his eyes flitting up and down your naked and marked body with that same cat’s smile, “but leave this to me. Stay there.”

“It would be faster if I–?”

You start to talk, but he interjects sharp but still sweet as he continues about his task. “No, my love. Stay.”

Whatever twisted mood he’s in, you’re not in any hurry to get him out of it. Asra hums to himself as he takes a generous bite of spiced bread, mixing together a tea blend and lighting the stove to get the water boiling. All the while you watch him, your eyes flitting over every detail of his sculpted features. He’s like a deliberate painting and he moves with such grace and precision. You sigh and snuggle into the blankets, casting a wayward glance at the burning fire.

You don’t notice him move back toward you while the kettle’s on, his footfall always so blessed light, but he crouches down and runs loving fingertips down the dipping curves of your hips and the sweeping lines along your throat. Two fingers bob their way inside of you again and you moan at the sudden contact, gnawing into your lower lip when he sheathes them to the knuckles.  
“Still so wet,” he remarks casually, as if making a point about the weather today. Asra ignores the whine, the half-hearted plea for rest. His eyes are pools of raw admiration when he crooks deeper inside of you and your breath comes out ragged and he presses the heel of the palm down and your next exhale is more savage than anything.

You try to grab for one of his many ornate chain necklaces to bring him in for a kiss, to bury yourself into the sweet swoop of his cupid’s bow, but he ducks just out of your grip and that’s your last coherent move. Silently punishing you for deigning to take charge, he shoves you harder into the furs and effortlessly finds the button inside of you to undo the fight for good, and it’s a rush beginning from the tips of your toes until all you can think of is Asra, Asra, Asra.

In your mind’s eye, there are flashes. A young, hooded traveler with his eyes on the nomads – with his eyes on the youngest of their gaggle, twirling and dancing to the clan musician’s tunes.

Back to reality. “I love you, hayati, noor al 3yn,” he purrs in your ear, fucking you rather mercilessly with his fingers gently letting you ride him through the end until you’re, once again, a pool of trembling, shuddering jelly on the furs. He traces patterns into your flushed skin, following along the lines of the beauty marks dotted all across your body.

His lean body wrapped in one of the many sheer, fine robes in his possession, he finally does lean down and kiss you. You take the opportunity to grab him in an expert lock and wrestle him to the ground, your naked body perched on top of him. You’ve only just caught your breath, your cheeks are still embarrassingly flushed, but you felt compelled to wipe that smirk off of his face in the only way you could.

Carefully, you crane your body until there is very little distance between your faces. Asra doesn’t fight it; he’s morbidly curious to see where this is going, tickled that you even have the energy to move. Your hair falls around your face, the tips of your noses barely touching when you say, “I’ve got you figured out, wizard.”

He tilts his head, seemingly nonplussed, his eyes flitting along the marks he’s left all over. You can plainly see him trying to piece together how you still have the swagger of control when you look … so very freshly fucked. “Is that all you wanted to say?”

“Perhaps you are a djinn,” you murmur. The irony is in the reverse of the tales of hearts being eaten by the beautiful demon, of course, but you can’t get wrapped up in semantics. Not when he looks so picturesque in his arrogance, staring up at you. “Perhaps something worse. Older than my clan has words for.”

Asra smiles beneath you, canines flashing, and he says, “If that’s true, then you’ve already lost.”

“No, you don’t understand,” you tell him, oddly calm, craning into him again, arching your back in a way that fixates him to you like a storm. “You seem so sure of yourself, that you have all of me in the palm of your hands … but you never will have me, will you? No matter what you do. That’s what upsets you the most.”

There’s a change in his eyes. He doesn’t expect a challenge like this, and you keep on, your low, melodic voice ringing in his ear like temple bells as you all but purr into him, the fingers of one hand sliding along the patterns of muscle on his chest and arms and say, “But I have you. All of you … to do with as I please. If I wanted to,” and your eyes are locked together as you say this, the other trained hand sliding over the increasing thumping beneath his chest. Asra hisses softly when your fingers start to dig into the flesh over the pounding. “I could cut your heart out and have it for breakfast.”

He looks like he’s considering letting you try, frustration and clear arousal mixing into the loveliness of his features. If you could read his mind at will you would know the details of the planning beginning to calculate in his eyes, but you save that for later. You take advantage of the shift in dynamic, and you swoop down for a heart-stopping kiss that leaves the Magician choking on the depths of your feelings for him pouring out. Nothing better to ruin his cocksure swagger than with sappy feelings.

You hate how much he loves sappy feelings, how he loves to tickle sweet nothings in your ear in the middle of the night and leave you burning red from embarrassment because he is equal parts adoration and sadistic in unpredictable swings of a pendulum, but it’s a good last-minute curve if administered correctly. He knows how notoriously terrible you are with compliments, he uses it against you most of the time – but this is a deliciously rare moment when you can get him back for it. You unceremoniously clap your hands on either side of his face.

And you tell him in a smaller voice, a much more insecure one, when you break from the kiss, “Even if the fates send me wondering to all corners of this earth, you are my home. My only home.”

He melts. In your bones you know you win.

Asra does not even attempt to hide the dreamy sigh and he looks like he’s made of frosting and marzipan again, leaning up to kiss you much softer this time, much more adoringly, wrapping your sore, naked form up into his arms. He kisses the top of your head and presses his nose into your hair, murmuring, “You’re the worst.”

And as you grin in response, the kettle begins to scream. Asra slips out of your grip, looking back at you with the wordless fireworks of promises to be fulfilled when he was done exploding behind his eyes. You hadn’t realized he’d left you a sizeable chunk of pumpkin bread near where you sat by the fire, and you take a hungry piece into your mouth.

You watch his peachy ass through the sheer fabric of the now half-hanging robe around his body, satisfied with yourself, content in the hard-won victory over the Magician and his vicious mood. Idly, you stretch your body to ease the muscles and when you begin to stretch your legs during the pause, a sharp hiss tumbles from your lips when a smooth spear of magic fills you up to the core - the bastard took advantage of your legs being open - stretching and pulsing deep inside of you.

Your body seizes and the pleasure sends you cascading down into an immediate delirium that you can’t even begin to put together in the moment, and as it pumps in and out of you Asra is on the other side of the room, pouring two cups of tea. As if it wasn’t even happening.

Asra pulls a chair from the table near the stove and sits with his legs crossed, sipping at the rims of the tea cup he’s made himself as he watches you buck, already overstimulated from the other two. Silently, he blows on the steaming liquid and your attempts to sit up have you on your stomach, fingers digging into the fur again, as another bolt of magic replaces the first, bursting into veins that crawl up your chest to dance in all the secret spots he knew lived, live on your body, squeezing just enough to have you mewl with the bliss.

He watches you all the while. Love and delighted mischief battle for dominance on his face.

“Normally, I would have let you have that one,” he tells you as you deliriously push yourself into the furs to ride alongside his magic. “But I can’t always let you win, my love. Where’s the fun in it?”

“Asra,” you beg him for the release much faster this time, “please, I just need an – ah–!”

He bends down to kiss you and his breath tastes like herbs, and he smiles into your mouth and says, “Go ahead. I’d do it myself but my knees are chafed from fucking you.”


	2. Lalla Fadila's Tobacco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Stuff from the past. Perfectly free of genitals flying around, this time. I take some liberties with canon as it fits with my Apprentice's story a little more fluidly in me brain. As always I am deeply upset by the white-haired puppet master that cursed my dick.

The Magician spent a long time watching you before he had the courage to speak to you. Months spent in the shadows of the argan trees that would dot the edges of one of the many villages of your birth, shrouded from the watchful and trained eyes of your clan Elders, all the while watching you. They were older, intimidating women with the glimmer of wisdom always shining in their eyes. They did not take kindly to interloping Magicians, especially the ones with designs – intentional or no, they were powerful enough to read true intentions – on such a bright young heir.

You were a young, promising ingenue – a gleam of a brighter future for your people, and they protected you fiercely from the wickedness of the outside world.

You had dutifully listened to your lessons, and held the ideals of your clan close to your heart. Family meant everything; the legacy of your people, even more. When the time came for your coming-of-age, you took the pain of the tattoos on your forehead, your arms, the backs of your hands and fingers gladly. It meant you were that much further down the path to adulthood, it meant you would be considered a credible voice in the troubles to come. No longer simply a child; it is a realization that filled you with pride once upon a time.

The clan didn’t raise a fool, however. And your skills were beginning to advance beyond the wisdom of your aunties, unchecked and fettering, and the potential brimming at your fingertips would even intimidate you sometimes, if the cryptic dreams at night were any indicator of what was to come. There was even one time where you set some herbs on fire by getting a little too fuming pissed.

In your youth you find yourself casting a wayward glance over the horizon, watching the sun and the way it stretches it arms over the land, and asking something, anything, what was meant by it. Sometimes you consider moving on to learn more, but you always stay. Leaving your family is an ache that you’re not yet ready to confront.

The Magician would tell you later that he never intended to take you away from them, that the chaos of the circumstances of your leaving was too easy to get lost in. You would remember the first time he stretched one tentative hand out to you for the rest of your days, asking if you’d like to wander, to learn how to develop the talents your aunties feared inside of you, amethyst eyes silently hoped that you would.

It seems like such a silly lie, and you feel it in the way that he kisses you in the days, months, years following your self-imposed exile. With hunger, with agitation – like you could turn to dust at any moment between his fingers, gone forever in a flash. He holds you greedily at night as if aware of it in the back of his brain, whispering that he still feels like he stole you sometimes.  
Usually, you shove a swift elbow into his gut, listen to the soft oof in response and remind him that you’re not an object to be stolen. And he mewls his apologies into your ear and concedes your point and you let yourself be consumed and you think: fuck.

Sometimes in the wee hours of the morning you feel him watch you sleep so peacefully and wonder if your aunties were right after all, looking at his hands considering the idea that he might have really stolen your soul. In many ways you always want to turn around and sarcastically remind him that your aunties are all cryptic old crones, but it bothers him. You see that plain as day.

Later, you would inform him it was your choice. Firmly, so there was no more argument on the matter. Your voice had an edge to it when you reminded him of your own agency in the situation, and he would smile so sweetly in response.

He has always wanted you. It was never a matter of just want.

Your aunties, save for perhaps Lalla Fadila, disliked the Magician with starlight in his hair from the very first moment they clapped eyes on him in the souq, on those days he was bold enough to let you see him. Practicing magic demanded humility, and they would say that his beauty is an omen of deals with devils dealt in darkness. There was more to him lying beneath the fragrant surface, and your grandmother’s insistence that the forces that be intended to take advantage of you somehow manifested in this young Magician.

Even moreso when they heard his native tongue spoken, a herald of the changing times coming from the east. They spoke of kings in the east wanting to expand. Some predicted that the expansion would stretch as far west as it possibly could. But you were a child still, and not yet bothered by the cares of wider politics.

“They speak of the blending of our cultures,” Lalla Fadila – your great aunt, an infinitely powerful old woman with vulgarity and experience always glimmering in her eyes – grumbled one evening when she spoke of those travelers from the East, a pipe on the edge of her wrinkled lips, “but I don’t trust them. Not one moment. Their goal is to make us like them, sweet child. Nothing less. Just you watch them paint us like savages.”

Eventually, the Magician from the east gets spoken of something much worse than some foreigner. Some begin to hiss that he might be a djinn with how his eye lingers, but they never speak it too loud lest it give him all the more power. Djinn are tricky, you see. Beings made, first and foremost, of fire. You never know its intention until its too late to stop it.

The Magician is more fearless than he lets on, however, and he would always mill his way into the crowd of onlookers inevitably watching you when you came to market to dance and sell jewelry. The silver anklets round your feet sang with your footsteps. The clan musicians would sing their songs, play their lutes, their bouzouki, their fiddles – but they all noticed the Magician standing in the crowd, watching you spin and twirl with some of your cousins, watching the way your hips would dip to the beat, the way your thick mane of dark, curled hair bounced all around you.

You knew, though. Your intuition spoke clear in the pit of your stomach about the Magician and the way he would watch, and you never sensed danger. Mischief, absolutely. But not danger. And that piqued your curiosity more than anything else, more than how impossibly gorgeous he would look watching you in the harsh afternoon sun at the souq. Beauty could be found everywhere, and you remember many a stern lesson by your mother to never be too taken in by a pretty face.

Alas, the two of you were teenagers at the time. Not exactly a prime age group for rational decision making. The both of you thought the other was exceptionally pretty, beyond all the unknowable and uncomfortably prickling forces at play behind your meeting. But more than enough of both of your motivations were just the stupidity of youth in full play.

A freeing thing to admit to each other, years later.

Sometimes in the dead of night, you whisper exactly how beautiful he thought was in his ear, watch him giggle, blush, shift into you and look up through his eyelashes. You’ve never found a kinder being on this earth but he’s insufferably vain when he thinks no one’s looking, and it’s easy to exploit. Especially when it comes to how you feel about him. There is a universe captured impossibly opalescent in his eyes, you find yourself lost every single time, and he knows. He fucking knows.

Your mother, Thiyya, is a wise and powerful woman. She loves you fiercely, has always tried to shelter you from the world at large, but sometimes that love clouded her to what you truly wanted. Sometimes, she tried to stop you from what your heart knew to be true.

Beauty courted danger. Watch the animals with bright colorings on them to attract prey, the way they lure an unsuspecting eye, and you understand a simple lesson of nature. Your mother would insist that the beauty that she saw in you was Heaven-sent, and didn’t warrant the same suspicion. It was a blessing; something to be celebrated, something to be cherished as a rarity.

You’ve never felt quite that delicate, though. Not by any means. Your childhood was spent brawling with your cousins and laughing too loud at jokes until you were spitting in sweet agony, just the same as the rest. Still your mother spoke like it was an already an established science, and one need only open an eye to see it thrumming all around.

“Your light is a gift, Ghania, a part of you,” she would tell you on some afternoons in between making tea from the mint leaves growing near your door. “And a djinn might snatch it if you ever drop your guard. You’ve been cursed with a beacon inside of you.”

In those moments, you would nod. Dutifully. You were a gifted student, and a dutiful child – the old stories spoke of Paradise being found at the feet of your mother and up until that point, you had no reason not to believe them.

He keeps coming back, though. The Magician. To watch you dance, to peruse the many wares sold from the vendors at the souq, to perhaps bask in the simple pleasure of a morning at the market. But mostly to watch you dance, and the kind smile that flashes across his face when he smiles at you from a distance for the first time cements itself into the pit of your heart.

You had at least one dream. The Magician, with his strange color palette and his smile that reminded you of the puff pastry that your mother was able to bring back from stints to the capital.

You don’t realize that you’ve been won over by a damn smile. You fancy yourself more savvy than that, less easily duped than your mother and your aunties might fear. So you touch the tip of your right middle finger to your nose, and back to him as a simple greeting, and return to your dancing, that simple thing that you use like a form of ritual to anchor yourself to the world, trying to ignore the way that your heart jumps, knowing he watches you so intently.

The drummers bang out their tune and you swish your hips, flitting this way and that with the music with your fingertips, your arms, your bright smile. Your feet stomp into the ground with the drum work, you sway and trust your body to take you along to the song safely.

Thiyya taught you well. You danced not only with emotion, but an intoxicating amount of charisma, the sort that bled out into the audience and captured their gaze front and center. You would make faces along the words and sentiment of any song, twine your body like a snake, smirk like a rogue – it was theatrical, it would earn many coins thrown at your feet.

On some holidays, you were able to throw bright red clay dust all around you, inevitably coating the audience as well.

Above all else, you visibly had fun. Adorable amounts of it. Your aunties, your cousins, your family always clapped their marked hands with you, cheering you on, praising the sun for another joyful, dancing child of the bloodline. It was the only time in your day that you could truly release the pent up swell of emotions that pulsated in the baffling rhythm of your strange young life.

Dance was a method of praise that forked separate from your curious, doubtful mind. Regardless of faith, it felt right. Right for your body to move this way, twine and leap, and even though it praised your gods – it felt divine in your own right.

Incidentally, it was the only thing you felt you had any skill in. Every other move you made felt bumbling. You were an awkward teenager in many ways, but to dance was to have your own freedom and help the family in tandem.

Arms crane up, and you spin with the swelling beat. Again and again you twirl as if to banish the creeping thoughts from your mind, but you don’t seem to realize that deeply, you want to speak to the Magician. Want to probe his mind, ask him what he wants, where he’s come from. There are stories of faraway places swirling, smoky in his pretty eyes and patience was never a virtue of yours.

And it is that sheer, pulsing will that slowed everything down around you for the first time, your magic coming out like a spout, and you only stop spinning to balk at everyone around you growing rigid, frozen in time. At first you thought it was the Magician, exerting his magic to confuse you, but he seemed as taken aback as you were at the frozen spectators.

A shocked giggle escaped him, and he clapped a hand over his mouth and you watched his eyes survey the extent and range of the damage. It looked too adorable for how angry you were at his alleged trickery, and you blush a bright hot red before you jab a finger in his direction, yelling through the feelings.

“What …” You trailed off, casting frantic glances at the frozen loved ones and market goers all around. They look fine, simply stopped. At once, you stare down the Magician. You squared your chest, never one to back down from a fight. “You! What have you done?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, and he regarded you very carefully as he spoke with a growing, unreadable – did he seem … tickled? – smile. “I think this is your work.”

“That’s ridiculous,” you told him, audibly scoffing. Ah, but as soon as he says it, you knew it to be true. “I … can’t do things like this. I’m no magician.”

One stark white eyebrow rose up and he tilted his head, gesturing to their rather damning surroundings. “Are you sure? I have no reason to lie to you … this wasn’t me.”

Well, not anymore, you’re not.

Your bravado deflated. You were just confused at that point, staring at the pretty Magician, scratching your head, looking around for some kind of solution and coming up with nothing. The idea of your family being frozen forever settled a panic into your gut. If he didn’t mean you harm, what did he want? “Can you … fix it?”

He didn’t pretend not to laugh. He tells you later it was because he thought it was cute. Like bells they rang on your ears as he took a step toward you and said, “I could, yes. But don’t you want to try?”

Not particularly. You gnaw on your lower lip, always irrationally hesitant to do things you haven’t yet mastered. You couldn’t hide the embarrassment at the honest response being no. “I don’t know how.”

The Magician’s eyes are impossibly warm. There is an unmistakable kindness that clings to his aura, and when you watch him move his lips and wordlessly begin to break the bumbling spell you’d casted on the unassuming market goers, you stopped him on an impulse.

“Wait!” you cried, and the young Magician stopped, watching and waiting curiously. “What’s … what’s your name?”

He smiled again, looking at you through half-lidded lashes. A much more mechanical voice in the back of your head informed you that this smile would haunt you for a long time. It was right.

“Asra.”

Cautiously, you took a step toward him. Names have power. It was a big risk to give him your name. The silver bells on your ankles let out a soft jingle with the movement. Never breaking eye contact, you tell him your name is, “Ghania.”

“You dance so beautifully, Ghania,” he told you, and you cannot help but notice the way his voice wraps around your name. “I’m sorry if I stare … it’s just so pretty. You’re really, very talented.”

His compliment is sincere and lacking in any ulterior motive and it tints your cheeks an unexpected and warm tint of pink. You are both still young, still in the first throngs of life, and every new relationship felt all the more intense from inexperience.

Not wanting to seem tripped up or too bewitched, you thank him. Without any further exchange between you – you don’t even see him closing the distance between the both of you – he walked up and slipped a small, silken coin pouch into your hand.

“I don’t want you to think I’m a cheapskate, coming to watch you all those times and never showing any appreciation,” he told you with a bashful smile. Something caught his attention in the moment and he sighed, casting a glance into the horizon. “Your spell will wear off soon, and it seems I’ve overstayed my welcome, anyway.”

Asra gestured with a soft laugh to your Lalla Fadila, her wizened, sun-kissed face frozen in a perfectly absurd mask of distrust and indignation less than 100 feet away from the both of you. The sight of it made you snort on contact and you’re distracted.

You open your mouth to tell him you don’t want his gold, but he was already gone, and the crowd was already cheering when the song came to its end. You stared at the empty space he left behind, unsure how the hell he even did that. Asra would leave you like that a lot.

One of your hands loosens the burgundy velvet coin purse and did indeed find a small handful of shimmering coins, but also a neatly folded piece of parchment that seemed to carry his fragrant scent. Once you were tucked out of sight from your nosey family members, claiming that you needed a moment’s rest, you unfold it.

There was a neatly (and rather artistically, you found) drawn picture of an oasis less than an hour’s ride from your village. Fateful decisions sometimes come quite obviously, and other times, they’re splayed out so evident it would be stupid not to have seen it for yourself.

Or so you told yourself.


	3. Fight Pub

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: In which you're a drunken fool and it disappoints your lavender wife. NSFW in some pockets.

         Is there ever a good time to get into a barfight?

         Most of the time, no. You like to think that you’re a fairly reasonable person – gifted with enough charisma to see your way through any given conversation and reach its peaceful conclusion. You don’t _look_ for scraps, but ignorance manifests itself in many irritating forms. Sometimes in response to your tattoos, other times your sharp temper, other times because … people are annoying.

         Either way, Asra’s spent a lifetime bandaging you up from scraps gone awry. Grumbled kisses into your embarrassed flesh, trying to insist that you were fine while actively bleeding from a cut lip, or you didn’t bandage your hands before a fistfight. How many times has he softly chastised you for not being invincible? And, in a voice that told you that you wouldn’t like what he said next, to stop picking fights with opponents three times your size.

         Blunt reality reminded you constantly that Asra is taller than you. That informs you enough of your size advantage in this world – you, however, are not a quitter. And like to think that your athletic stature from years of dancing could translate to scraps. Good scraps.

         So, you stop fighting. For Asra’s sake. It used to be a way to release pent up aggression from the disconnect with your family, but somewhere in the middle you got lost in the savage delight of it. It’s a rush, and it’s catharsis, and the love of your life hates it very much.

         You sit at the Rowdy Raven one night, however, staring at the half-drunk pint of the swill they serve and stare at your knuckles. Ilya sits beside you, yammering on about something that you stopped paying attention to five minutes earlier and you fixate on a man at the bar being a loud, drunken nuisance. A mechanical voice in your head informs you that Asra isn’t here. He vetoed the night at the tavern to catch up on sleep.

Gods, you could go for a scrap. It wouldn’t be much because he’s a drunk fool but it would be something. This is bread crumbs.

         That wonderful realization brings a new life into your eyes and you watch the man far more intently now, listening to him harass the bar maid and the patrons sitting to his left and right. And he notices you staring – who wouldn’t, with how clear your disgust is on your face? You know and don’t care.

         “You got those freak eyes on me, witch?” The man demands.

         You stand to your feet. Ilya watches the scene unfold with a spiking amount of anxiety, too wrapped up in his story to realize your attention had been elsewhere entirely. “Ghania. What on earth are you doing?”

         As if he hadn’t spoken to you, you address the man across the pub and you recite your initiate fight script, “I think that you’re a simpering fool and should come say that to my face.”

It’s not hard to start a scrap. Just ask a stupid man with a chip on his shoulder and nothing to lose, and in your heart you know this, and you know Asra knows you know this.

         But Asra’s not here! And Ilya isn’t intending on stopping whatever’s about to happen. Behind his eyes you can see him starting to enjoy and wonder the display, and you instantly feel a warmer sentiment toward the gangling doctor because he enables your destructive behaviors with such gusto. The man will do anything for theatrics. It’s what fueled your friendship thus far.

         The other man takes your obvious goad. Seven hells, he’s probably been depending on your intervention all night, because whatever awful day he’s having he’s convinced himself that a fight is just the ticket. Lucky for the both of you, you’re on the same page.

         He looks you up and down, and you can already see him underestimating you. “You’ll probably turn me into a fuckin’ frog, eh? Or maybe a goat? You savages love your goats, don’t ya? Heh, why don’t you give me a tea reading or wotever the fuck you lot scam us with?”

         You square your shoulders and push through the stink of man funk and booze, never hesitating once to look the man square in the eye. You hold a hand out for the bottle of whiskey on your table and Ilya stutters, coming back to reality, and hastily hands it to you. You throw it back and let the warm liquid burn your throat on its way down. You never break eye contact with your opponent.

Blandly, as if he was dirt on your shoes, you ask him, “We done talking?” Both of you are using each other’s unchecked aggression for selfish and self-destructive reasons, yes, let’s get to the scrap.

         Ilya watches in the background, rather comically fascinated by the scene unfolding before him. He’s so damn pale you notice immediately that he’s starting to blush, and is uncharacteristically quiet for how he never shuts the fuck up.

No, but you need to focus on the scrap.

         The man lands a sucker punch on contact to your cheek and you feel your body slam back into one of the wood pillars holding this stinking hole upright and hiss with the pain. Ilya shoots to his feet but you hold one hand up and shake your head. Without any further argument, he plops right back into his seat, talking to himself, but you’re too engrossed in the fight to actually process the words out of his mouth.

         You focus on the man again. In three languid steps that you take toward him he swings another drunken haymaker your way and you duck out of its path easily, landing a cross to his throat that leaves him stumbling back, sputtering for air.

         You take that moment to crack your knuckles and bury a right hook into the man’s jaw, feeling that split moment of contact between his skull and your fist and he doubles back, roaring out like an animal. Some lone, drunken patrons cheer in the background.

         To your left, you grab a discarded chair and smash it on his back and the five other patrons that night sink a little closer in their seat as the splintered pieces go everywhere. The drunken man crashes to the ground and you kick him onto his back and stare down at him, your face visibly unimpressed.

         “Why would I waste my time and power by using magic at all?” you demand, grabbing him by the collar and flinging him with into the corner of the pub, watching him slam into the loose furniture and lay limp and groaning. Through a sneer, you tack on, “May I have the privilege of sewing your shroud, you fucking fool.”

         Ilya knows it to be an old curse and his face splits into a half-drunken, sputtering laugh. He’s smart and he’s cultured, and he’d already had dealings and tell with travelers from the many clans that made up your people. Unable to help yourself, you cast a glance back at the only member of the audience that mattered and throw him a satisfied smirk.

         “Told you I got it,” you tell him, catching your breath. You’re a performer in your bones and sometimes the audience is one disastrously socially inept doctor and his flare for theater.

         He blinks, flushing another hue of red before he says, “Message received.”

         You cast your gaze on the barkeep and you tell them, “I can pay for any damage.”

         “Right,” says the barkeep, looking you up and down trying to get a read on what the fuck just happened and their obvious miscalculations about who you are.

         Satisfied with yourself, you plop back into the seat across from Ilya and he’s watching you with a new sense of bemused shining in his good eye and you can tell he’s trying to ask for some clarification on at least three things about you. Which is fair, you haven’t had a good fight in years. At least not with any worthy opponents.

         “What an asshole,” you tell your friend, crossing your arms with a peaceful exhale. Decent scrap, you hum in your mind.

         “Yes, uh – you’re absolutely right. If I could interject with a single question?”

         “Yeah?”

         “You’ve got a bruise beneath your eye … a few knicks here and there, as it were. I could … help? Doctor and all that.” You look at him with an eyebrow quirked, about to ask him why he’s being so weird and jumpy, but he’s drunk and his thoughts are painfully obvious. It’s cute.

         “I’m fine,” you tell him, grabbing the whiskey to take another swig as you come off the shot of adrenaline. “I’ll heal myself with a spell before I get home tonight.”

         Ilya tilts his head with plain concern and he asks you, “What’s the logic of that when you could simply heal it now?”

         And you look him in the eye and he tell you him the truth, and the truth is a little more telling of your personality than you want it to be, and you say, “I like fights. Like the feeling after a fight.”

         The blush painted across his face like a fresca grows a deeper shade of red. The good doctor is about is as subtle as a punch to the face. “I imagine Asra doesn’t know about this … I must say interesting vice of yours, Ghania.”

         “Oh, he knows,” you tell him, throwing your head back in a fond laugh at the memories that come flooding through you of the way his face puckers in hopelessly worried frustration when you would come home scratched and bruised. “My temper has been a problem since we were young ones. He gets upset when I fight – for obvious reasons, I suppose. He says I’m too reckless with my life, I tell him to relax, he gets angry, it’s a useless cycle. One that I’m not … too keen on getting into these days.”

         In the silence you exchange knowing glances, Ilya already aware of their respective tale of woe and Asra’s potent and memorable three years of pining after your ghost. His past relationship with Asra doesn’t bother you, and you’re glad they weren’t entirely alone. You feel a touch awkward when the elephant hangs in the room, but that’s not your business. It gives you both of an understanding of the Magician that requires little verbal explanation.

         You break the silence with a shrug. “Good scrap, though.”

         “Oh, it was artistry at work,” Ilya gushes, sliding his face to frame into the palm of his hand again. The candle between you both gives shadow to some of the hard lines on his face, the focus with which he stares at you and studies you. “He must have been twice your size! And you tossed him like he was a bag of feathers. Always so full of surprises, eh?”

         “A lot of it is knowing how easy it is to turn the weight of your opponent against them,” you tell him like it was an honorable match in any sense of the word. Ilya does not forget his beginnings, however, much like you – he understands the glory and nuance of a good scrap.

         Ilya raised a finger and says, “I should point out that you did smash a chair on the man’s back.”

         You suck on your teeth, “All’s fair when your opponent’s a donkey.”

         And he barks out a laugh, raises a glass and he replies, “Good point.”

         “A fight, a drink,” you hum, thinking of the past, your brain elsewhere entirely in the warmth of tea houses and the crooning of bards strumming sitars far, far away with your magician. “All we need now is a dance.”

         An idea flashes in his eyes before you can begin to comment on it and he looks at you with a devilish grin and says, “I can help with that.”

         “You–?”

         Ilya’s shot out of his seat without another word, and you watch his long legs move away as he leans over the bar and speaks to the barkeep, glancing at you every now and then like a child with an obvious, delicious secret. Your head tilts, and you watch his movements, the strange but languid way he carries himself.

         The barkeep reaches behind somewhere and pulls a guitar and a fiddle, and the familiarity with which he speaks to the barkeep informs you that he’s known the instruments were back there the whole time. A strangely charming thing to be found in an otherwise dank hole in the wall, and you can’t begin to put together why.

         The barkeep, surprisingly jolly given the damage you had just done to their establishment – and the unconscious man – angles the fiddle up with a shrug and they say, “S’not like this place can get any worse.”

         “Would you honor us all with a dance after such a rousing scrap, Ghania?” Ilya asks you rather theatrically from across the bar. He’s never seen you dance. He hides behind his bravado and the drinking of the evening but you can see what brews behind his stormy eyes, how he watches you with no small amount of longing.

         Never one to back down from a challenge, you slide to your feet in one fluid motion with a widening smirk on your face and you say, “So long as you play beautifully for me, Ilyushka.”

         Your words shoot like a current up his spine and you can all but feel him shiver. Ilya eyes you, nods once at the barkeep, and they begin with a tune the two of them seem to know well, and you begin to feel the emotions and sentiment of every note that comes from a sing written about home. It’s one both of them know well, and you can tell in the way that they play that makes the room feel warmer.

         In one, two steps you’ve all but created a little dance floor for yourself and you let yourself fly to the music, listening to the familiar way in which all music sounds guide your movement. A language that your body knows fluently, you twine and angle your arms to the way that the music speaks, grinning from ear to ear at the rush of euphoria. There is a steady beat that guides every step, every angle of your fingers to frame your face.

         Your two loves in one night: fighting and dancing. You sigh with the ecstasy of being able to dance like this, extending your arms out in an elegant twirl that you let continue one, two until you’re stopped just short of Ilya, his long fingers strumming the guitar dutifully, but his eyes fixated on every move that your body makes and there’s a warm tingle that you feel beneath your skin at the sensation of it.

         On your heel you spin fast, an easy and languid twine with your hips and you cast him a glance over your back with perfect view of every singular motion, every undulation of your hips. Through dark lashes over your shoulder you dare him to do something else. You smile like a goblin, mostly in reaction to the way that he tries to maintain his composure and how lovely the blush is against his skin, and dash and jump back into the makeshift center and stomp your foot to the corresponding beat, the remainder of the coherent patrons of the bar cheering at the sight of it.

         The end comes to a swell and you kick your feet up with the song, and soon everyone dances together, brought at once in drunken abandon. You watch Ilya, and he seems happy. It’s a comforting sight for a man that likes to drown himself in his own melancholy on most days.

         He catches your eye, stares at you across the crowd of drunken brutes and lowlifes dancing like ingenues at a harvest festival and he seems to laugh once, incredulous. He lets the barkeep play something solo and crosses the distance to you, offering a hand out.

.        “You have to dance with me after that,” he says in a moment of dazzling confidence, extending a hand. And with a small smile you cannot hide you slip a hand into his and let him whisk you away. You crane your neck a bit to get a good look at his face – so blasted tall – and you find yourself weightless with how he leads you here and there. “You are absolutely incredible.”

         “So light on your feet, Ilya,” you remark, feeling the way his fingers dig just ever so more into the small of your back as he guides you through the song. A natural.

         “You are … breathtaking, do you know that?” he asks, almost as if he’s asked a serious question, the crowd in the Rowdy Raven beginning to fade away into a dull roar with the intensity of how he gazes at you. “It’s important to me that you know that.”

         It’s easy to look up at him through your lashes and you do, trying to play it cool through the warmth growing in your cheeks, the tips of your fingers, the tips of your toes at how damned sincere he is about everything and you say, “I’ve been dancing a long time.”

         Ilya exhales and brings your bodies closer until you’re touching down to your ankles and he replies, in a lower, embarrassed voice, “Should I stop?”

         “No,” you say, holding his dumbfounded gaze. “No, I don’t want you to stop, Ilya.”

         “Really?” it comes out nearly breathless, now. Hope blossoms into the way he leads and he spins you for a moment before bringing you crashing back to him in a fluid motion. “I would never want to … interfere with you and Asra.”

         “There are no secrets between us,” you say. “But he doesn’t own me, if that’s what you’re afraid of. As always … I will do as I please.”

         Ilya leans down with you so gingerly in his grip and he says, his voice growing thick with longing, “I am entirely at your disposal to do with as you please, darling.”

         There is a glimmer of mischief in your eyes, your muscles tensing at such an image in your mind’s eye. “Is that a promise?”

         And he dips you backward in one dramatic sweep, and you see his teeth begin to gnaw into his lower lip as he pulls you back up, your bodies pressing flush together when he says, “A promise. A vow. Whatever you want.”

         In one fluid motion you wrap your arms round his neck and bring him down for a kiss, emboldened by the drink. The doctor melts in your touch with a dreamy sigh, letting his arms coil around your waist to bring you closer, always closer. Maddening chemistry at how he touches you begins to set your blood ablaze.

         “I want _you_ , Doctor Devorak,” your purr when the kiss breaks and the breathlessness threatens to choke you both. You relish in the sight of such a tall man all but begging to bend to your will. “Could you give that to me?”

         Ilya takes your hand, then. And in the drunken stupor he leads you to a darker and more ignored corner of the pub and pins you hard against the wall, one hand propped over your head as he leans down.

         The look on his handsome face is a perfect picture of debauched intention. One tentative finger traces your jaw when he says, “Never doubt that you can have every inch of me whenever you want … however you want, lovely creature.”

         Your eyes flit up the inviting pose that he strikes and your patience snaps like a twig between your hands and you grab him by his stupid poofy shirt and push onto the tips of your toes. “Stop talking and put your coin with your mouth is, Ilya.”

         “ _Fuck_ ,” he breathes, pulling you into such a tight and desperate kiss that you briefly lose awareness of being in public again. You smirk into the kiss, your fingers moving to knot into his hair. Testing the water, you gently bite into his lower lip, relishing in the way he bucks into you and pushes you that much harder against the wall.

         “Ilya,” you stop him, the alcohol starting to finally make you more dizzy than you originally intended. “This – I want you very badly … but not tonight, yeah?”

         “Oh, of course,” he stammers, flushing another bright shade of red at the pent up frustration between the two of you. You hate being responsible for once during the whole goddamn night but you know you need to talk to Asra before anything concrete happens, as much as the throbbing between your legs suggests otherwise.

         The two of you drink more. You don’t know how you got home.

You sleep in a dreamless void for once and your brain is too busy purging your body of the toxins you force-fed it. That peaceful oblivion is interrupted – you fully intend to sleep through half the day – with an abrupt flash of obnoxious light on your face. You open one bleary eye to see the lavender object of your affections staring down at you, who’s quite dramatically pulled the curtains for a wake up call.

         Immediately, you’re hit with the horrible ache from the swelling that was able to advance overnight on your face and you instinctually grasp the offending area with your hand and grumble with the pain. It feels like a black eye. And then the pain on your back hits from making contact with that pole. Oh, fuck me, you think, last night starting to come back in slow doses.

         Asra is less than pleased. “Good morning.”

         You’re used to him wanting to soothe you at least before he yelled at you, but this morning that’s simply not in the cards. You were too drunk to heal your face. It looks like he wants you to sit in your stupidity for a bit.

         You push your hair out of your face and you flash him an innocent enough grin, unable to help the urge to bat your eyelashes to help your case. “Morning.”

         “No,” he says. “No, that doesn’t work this time, Ghania. You should look at yourself.”

         And you do, casting a hesitant glance at the looking glass across the bedroom and you see the bruise in full detail. You grimace, stifling an embarrassed laugh. It looks bad. You look down at your right hand, see your bruised knuckles staring back at you.

         What can you say? “I’m … sorry.”

         “You’re not, though,” he tells you, pacing back and forth. “And I think that’s worse. Do you see your face, Rani? Look at your back! How big was this one? Which drunken brute did you let goad you into a fight?”

         You exhale, scratching at the back of your head. “Asra.”

         “I guess I should be happy in a twisted sort of way,” he says with an incredulous, agitated laugh. “Not even death will teach you some sense of caution.”

         “Asra.”

         “ _No_ ,” he cries. “You’re going to hear this. I know you. You are not only brilliant, but you are sharp enough to charm wolves. You never have to fight anyone if you don’t want to, and that’s what upsets me. That you wanted to. That you risk your life for a fucking thrill.”

         You want to grumble about how astute he is and how you don’t like it but it’s not the time and you just clutch your aching head. “You weren’t supposed to know.”

         Two snowy eyebrows raise to look at you, incredulous all over again. “Is this you admitting that you were just gonna lie to me, Rani? Is that the best idea right now?”

         “No,” you grumble. “I have a headache.”

         “Good,” he says. “Maybe it’ll knock some sense into you. I should wring Ilya’s neck for not stopping you, but knowing him he probably encouraged it. You’re both a pair of drunken morons.”

         You pout. “It wasn’t even that good of a scrap.”

         Asra shoots you a withering look in response, finally leaning down to gently surround your face in soothing, seafoam green healing magic. “Is that supposed to comfort me?”

         “I won,” you point out.

         “Do you think that matters?” he demands, and you wince at the initial sting of the internal bleeding fading away. “Your body is new. You can’t fall into your old habits again. At least not to show off.”

         “I wasn’t showing off.”

         “You were absolutely showing off.”

         “Asra,” you call his eyes back to you with the voice you know he can’t ignore or rationalize his way through. “I’m fine! I’m great, actually.”

         He frowns, presses one firm but delicate pad of his index finger into the comically sized bruise on your back and you wince on contact. He stares at you, silently daring you to try and argue again. “Yes, you’re clearly fine.”

         Heaving an exasperated sigh, he brings the palm of his hand to soothe the bruise on your back gently, smoothing his fingers into the purpling flesh, watching you lean against the sensation and tuck into the safety of his shoulder.

         There’s a pause before you mutter, “I wasn’t showing off. I was making a point.”

         Asra grabs your now healed face by the jaw and he drops down to your eyelevel as you sat at the edge of the bed. “Tell me what the point you were making was, Ghania.”

         You shrug bashfully, feeling the hill that you’re supposedly dying on begin to give way beneath your feet. “Don’t be a bastard in public?”

         “You don’t want to understand what this is like for me, do you?” he demands, then. Any patience for your jokes to alleviate the tension is nowhere to be found, and he holds your right hand up by the wrist to use your bruised knuckles to illustrate his point. It’s very hard to look him in the eyes because you can feel all the frustration and despair and relief hanging around him like a shroud. “I woke up and nearly had a heart attack.”

         You scratch at the back of your head. The conversation is at a waystation and you know how to turn it into an argument. You don’t want that. “What do you want me to say?”

         “I’d make you swear to stop,” and he looks at you with an I’m Disappointed frown and it’s the worst of this dressing down when he adds, “but I tried that already.”

         It’s a knife in your gut. “You say that I should think about how you feel,” you tell him, your focus shifting away for a moment. Ah yes, the horror of having died. And you look at him with fingers digging into the comforter and you say, “but I’m the one that fucking died.”

         Asra falls silent. You haven’t spoken much about your processing of and your memories coming to and fro, flashes of wasting away, your awareness of heat and screams and the nothingness. You hide that. The anger, the white hot rage that had been lying dormant begins to steam and dig its claws inside of you.

         Containing the shake in your voice, you say, “I remember in pieces, you know. Sometimes like I’m there again. Wasting away, it … it’s not a good way to go. Not for me. I needed something to feel alive – to feel like myself. It was irresponsible. I’m sorry.”

         You watch the horror of what you mean wash over him. Vivid nightmares about your death, in painstaking detail, every other night for what’s felt like weeks. And Asra is sat at your side in an instant and says, so sadly that it nearly breaks your heart, “You never told me you’re remembering dying.”

         “Because you’ll blame yourself,” you tell him, your hands balling into fists, your eyes boring holes into the ground because you can’t bear to look at him while admitting this. “More than you already do.”

         “Rani,” he says, pushing some of the thick tendrils of dark hair from your face, pulling you close enough that your foreheads touch and he can stare into your damn soul and he rubs calming little circles into your back as he says, “I need you to talk to me about these sorts of things. I feel your despair, your terror at night I … I don’t want to pry, but if it’s about the Lazaret … please, please let me help you. Please don’t just make me watch you suffer.”

         And you sigh and exhale a small handful of the crushing stress that’s been living inside of your chest and tuck yourself into the crook of his neck; the only place in the charted world you feel safe. “I left you alone for three years.”

         “Don’t,” he breathes, and your lips are much closer now, and his arms start to close around you. He’s forgiven you for the fighting – for now, anyway. “You’re back now. It … everything up until that doesn’t matter anymore.”

         You get flashes of the hollow echo. The way it affected his relationships with the living, to have his head so fixated on the dead.

         “You brought me back,” you say, still thrown. A meticulous plot, concocted in his brilliant and beautiful brain because he simply refused to let you stay dead. If he was even remotely ready for you to make jokes about it, which he is not, you would.

         “Had to,” he says. “Don’t ask me to live without you.”

         You kiss him. You can’t think of anything else to do, so overwhelmed with the sudden and potent tidal wave of love that crashes onto you. You sigh when he deepens the kiss, letting yourself become surrounded by the aroma of incense and cloves that cling to him when he pulls you to straddle him.

         The thought hits you fast, and when your magician starts to whisper how much he loves you into your skin, when his fingers start making their way up your lines and curves, you stop him by knocking foreheads.

         “So … last night Ilya told me he wants me.”

         “Of course he did,” Asra murmurs, his warm fingers beginning to creep beneath the shirt of his that you drunkenly threw on your body at some point last night. He seems utterly unfazed, ghosting the pads of his fingers across your nipples and watches you shiver through half-lidded lashes as he adds, “Why wouldn’t he want you? I bet he was adorably pathetic.”

         You stifle a small laugh. “Agh, but it was cute.”

         “You’re cute,” he whispers, the tomcat smile on his face growing wider when you start to make those noises he loves, palming one of your breasts as he brings his lips to nibble at your earlobe. “Mm, tell me. What do you want to do about it?”

         “I kinda want to fuck him,” you tell him, and the Magician laughs into your flushed body. “He definitely wants me to fuck him.”

         “He watches you like a puppy,” Asra remarks. “Did you dance for him, my love?”

         “Not for him specifically,” you say, flashes of the drunken crowd appearing in your mind’s eye. “But yes, I did dance.”

         He chuckles into the space behind your ear, littering your throat with open-mouthed, hot kisses that start to make you dizzy. Your smalls start soaking into the soft fabric of his trousers as you sit there, straddled and vulnerable in that way you can only be for your magician. “Your dancing was probably the nail in his coffin, poor man.”

         Despite yourself you let out an audible snort. “It was a gift for everyone present last night, thank you very much.”

         “Oh, I know,” Asra purrs, squeezing you by the ribcage so tight that your body starts to move for him without any conscious thought. “I’ve spent years watching you dance, Rani. I can only imagine Ilya wanting you more with every step, just as I do, and how he imagines how your body might move for him late at night.”

         And a lazy, hopelessly flushed smile starts to tickle the corners of your mouth and you ask him, “You can imagine it, can you?”

         “Nope.” You let out a debauched gasp when two fingers inside of you, and he watches you hungrily when he starts to work you into a building rhythm with his right hand. “I don’t have to imagine a thing, do I? Mm, sweet thing, you’re already so soaked for me.”

         “Don’t think this means I want you any less,” you feel you have to tell him, your fingers trailing languishing patterns into his golden skin. “Fuck, I don’t think that’s possible.”

         Asra lets out a contented little hum. “I never thought that, my love. If you want … Ilya can even join us one night. Or two, depending on how much you like it. Is that what you want, hm? You want Ilya to watch me fuck you, _amira_?”

         This is driving you insane and you whine into the crook of his neck as his fingers mercilessly probe their way inside and outside of you, the blueprint of your body intricately memorized in his brain. Every button, every switch, every little thing to drive you further into the void. “Yes.”

         “Yeah?” Asra’s breath is husky in your ear, and you watch him bite into his lip picturing it. “Maybe I’ll let him fuck you, but I won’t let either of you finish until I say. He’ll be inside you … but it’s my name on your pretty lips. Mm, I like the thought of that.”

         “I could watch you fuck him,” you whisper deliriously.

         “Yeah?” He crooks his fingers to a curve, digging deeper and you cry out again and you know he likes that image very much. The air is perfumed with whatever blend of incense he has burning and sweat and he all but has you shaking and panting. “Fair warning, I won’t let you touch yourself. Not for one second. I wonder how long you’ll be able to stand it.”

         Between his fingers and the way that he whispers his filthy intentions into your skin, combined with his teeth raking love bites across your throat, you can feel your end approaching on a shimmering horizon that you expect Asra to cruelly rip from your hands.

         “Aiiiih, fuck, love,” you whine and mewl, rolling your hips into his fingers, cursing how desperate your body is for his attention every moment of every damn day. Any dirty talk is lost in the fog he creates. You push yourself through the urge to beg him to let it end, you put either of your hands against his face and ride his fingers like you would his cock, holding his gaze, and you see how it drives him wild. “You’re my home, my … _ahn, fuck, Asra!_ … fuck, it’s like I fell in love with the moon.”

         There’s a pause before Asra removes his fingers with a slip and pins you hard to the mattress and stares into your soul as he says, “I was going to edge you until you begged me, made you apologize for fighting, but … ah, you’re so cute when you talk like this. I could just–?”

         You don’t even let him complete the thought. “Yes.”


	4. You, Me, and Countess Makes Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I've always been fascinated with the dynamic of dancer and spectator.... but make it gay. NSFW toward the end - I'm so mad I love Nadia so much but she is my tol wife and I am a simple creature.

         You examine yourself in the mirror. Every minor detail, every request of color and adornment, followed down to the letter by the Countess. It’s almost a speechless sight, and you twirl to let your billowing skirt fly out around you to see how it responds to movement. A matching, tied cropped chest piece feels like skin.

         The palms of your hands and the soles of your feet are stained with henna specifically for the occasion.

         The fabric is effortlessly light, a shimmering, sheer shade of aqua blue dotted with gold, swirling leaves. Your hands and fingers glisten with the diamonds there, and for a moment you feel a bit _too_ extravagant. The silver bells on your ankles let out a soft jingle as you shift from foot to foot, examining yourself.

         To keep your hair from bothering you, it hangs in a long plait.

         You frame the _dupatta_ round your face for a moment, mimic the faces you like to make in the middle of a dance number. Gold bands cling to your forearms and onto your biceps, and you gently adjust the fine jewelry placed down your hairline, jeweled pendant resting on your head.

         Your head turns when the door opens and you see Asra standing in the doorway, in his own breathtaking piece. It looks like he dug out a pair of loose harem pants out, and a sheer black fabric clings to every individual muscle on his lean body.

         He’s beautiful. Effortless and incandescent, he takes in the sight of you, silently walking toward you like he’s made of water, nearly silent in the pointed slippers he wears. The love of your life is a vision with every move he makes, and you find your heart squeezing with the crushing reality of your feelings for him every single day.

“ _Ya Allah_ ,” he breathes like a prayer with a splitting smile across his face, hands reaching out to take yours. The shock white of his hair is slicked back so you’re unprotected from the onslaught of his eyes. “Let me look at you, Rani.”

A blush finds its way to your cheeks. Years with him and he still makes you feel like a damn teenager, and you let him spin you to get the full picture before he pulls you flush to his body. With a small, sly smile you ask him, “Will I do?”

“I think you’ll snatch everyone’s heart,” Asra tells you, bringing your hands up to his lips to shower in butterfly kisses. “Just like you did mine.” 

“Silver tongued mage.”

You kiss him, letting his arms ghost around you, noting how delicate he’s being with your outfit. Asra spins you when the kiss breaks, resting his head on your shoulder so you’re both in the mirror. A fire of pride burns in his eyes as he says, in your ear, “I’m sure the Countess will want to whisk you away to her quarters.”

You suck your teeth, casting a blushing scowl into the nearest wall. It’s true that the Countess’ attentions have been… especially intent these days, as you’ve spent many a day in the palace at this point. Conversations with her are like staring into the sun. “If she gets over wanting to keep me as a pet, that is.”

“That’s just Nadi’s way,” he tells you. “She knows she can never keep you – that no one ever could. I think that’s half the fun.”

“You’re awfully relaxed about this,” you point out with a teasing smile, sighing at the way at the way he traces his fingers along the exposed flesh of your midriff. “You usually want me for yourself.”

Asra laughs, low and melodic in your ear. “I want you to enjoy yourself, my love. I intend to watch you dance until I’m old and in the ground – there’s no rush, if your attentions take you somewhere else for a bit. You always find your way back to me, don’t you?”

“My heart is yours, you know,” you say, and you know he knows it but you feel you have to tell him again. “All of it.”

He plants a fierce kiss to your temple, murmuring his adoration into your skin, “ _Ya rouhi_ … _ya noor al 3yn_.”

* * *

The ball the Countess threw to welcome the coming of summer was always going to be an extravagant affair. Much to your surprise, Nadia took your advice to make the event open to the public, and many a wide-eyed citizen wandered through the palace gates that night with stars in their eyes at the magnificent spread before them.

 You have made no secret of the fact that you hold a certain distaste for the ruling classes. Between your open sneering at courtiers, and the way that you’ve scandalized members of the Countess’ court with frank commentary, you honestly wonder how you haven’t been kicked out onto your ass on some days. Nadia, however, not only acknowledges your righteous anger but sympathizes in a way that you find surprising coming from the wealthy.

In the Countess’ face, you detect a sincere desire to do good. To _help_ the masses. You want to point out that that sentiment is nice but she still lives in an insane palace, but you figure baby steps are good. Nadia has made it clear time and time again that she values your input.

Tonight isn’t about politics, however. You decide that when you’re fully dressed, and when the festivities begin in earnest and the Countess announces entertainment from the likes of Vesuvia’s best dancers, you stand out of sight and roll your shoulders.

The band starts off slow, and when you step into sight, you assume your evening role of court dancer and let it wash over your mind. You step into view in the makeshift stage that Nadia arranged for, and you take deliberate, slow steps to the beat, framing your face languidly to the slow beat.

 In the corner of your eye, you feel your Magician’s warm gaze.

You pivot and spin on your heels, sticking one of your legs out as you land on your right foot and turn to face the Countess herself, watching you intently from her seat. The singers croon in the native tongue of the Satrinava clan.

You let a widening smirk grace your face and you shift your hips to the percussionists, and stretch your arms in the air to face her proper. And when the beat picks up in earnest, you fling yourself here and there, letting the melody sing its way through your body.

The Countess’ gaze never leaves you. You dance all the more passionately under the burning sensation you feel, her coifed brows quirking at every swish of your hips, her full lips twitching ever so slightly.

Like ebb and flow you sing and twine your body for the lost lover described in the song, and when you catch your gaze you allow slivers of your magic to slip from your body as you spin and spin, and the Countess finds herself seemingly alone in the ballroom with you.

One step, two step, you walk toward her, your hips swiveling to the song still playing loud and bright in both of your ears. You cross the distance between the two of you, and you bring yourself to your knees before her, shooting her an impish smile before craning your body backward, your arms stretching out behind you.

 Nadia doesn’t move a muscle. Her eyes are fixated on you.

In a flash, you’re upright and pull yourself up, agonizingly slow, on the arms of the chair where the Countess sits and hold her gaze, noting the way the hunger mounts for you in her dark eyes. How you adore to undo such a poised woman, and you make that teasing delight plain on your face.

“Careful, Good Countess,” you whisper, so quiet that it’s a secret between the two of you, bringing your lips near her ear. “The whole palace is watching.”

You bring yourself so close that Nadia’s errant scent of jasmine and orange blossoms catches your nose and you smile again. As if on instinct, she reaches out to touch you, to frame her hand against your face, but just as quickly as you appeared, you rush back to the center of the stage and the spell snaps closed in a rush. The silver bells on your ankles ring out with the movement.

You are the seductress of every haunting tale of Nadia’s childhood, spoken between petals of marigold. You play the role as if your life depended on it. Her sisters have their eyes on you as well, but you make sure Nadia thinks that she’s the only one that matters to you.

The two of you aren’t alone anymore, and Nadia comes back to reality with a start. You throw a wink at her, and she seems unsure it even happened if not for that.

Your body freezes and you pull up the edges of your skirt to show the way that your calf moves, spinning with a graceful, planned fall to rest on your thighs for a moment, catching your breath as the song shifts to another. In and out your chest heaves with the breath, the audience roaring with their praise and applause.

The crowd seems to dull around your ears and you feel fingers tilting your chin up, seeing the ghostly figure of a shadow clone that your Magician has cast of himself. The shimmers on the edges of the double tell you that you’re the only one that sees him, and you cast a glance to the real Asra mid-conversation with Nazali.

The double urges you to your feet at the swell of another song, bringing its lips to your ear, “Will you dance for me, my love? Remember to keep your eyes on the Countess.”

“Bastard,” you tell him under your breath, suppressing a flushed giggle at the tickle of your midriff with the tips of his fingers. “You said you’d behave.”

“I lied,” the double replies in your ear, squeezing your ribcage and the real Asra turns to look at you with a broad wink. “Eyes front, _amira_. The palace is watching.”

So you do, stretching your arms into the air to make a diamond with your forearms, craning backward and feeling your Magician’s fingertips dragging his fingers up your chest. With the swell of the band you begin to try and outrun the attempt to tease you so shamelessly, the crowd cheering as you dash in an elegant circle, your hands sticking out with the steps you take.

You stop near the eyelevel of the Countess again, and you let your breathtaking skirt fly out as you spin again, the hands of your Magician’s sly double catching you and throwing you so you can catch your balance and land on your feet. It dances with you to the T, Asra more than aware of your tendencies of dancing, more than equipped to anticipate any of the moves you might make and matching them along. You forget how spectacular of a dancer he is sometimes.

He wants to dance with you, but he doesn’t want the attention of it.

A passing moment here, a split second there, the ghostly hands will slide up your thighs. You keep composure, but he makes it blessed difficult every step. So you keep your eyes on the Countess, your lips parting invitingly when she smiles at you with her usual poise. Oh, but there’s hunger in her eyes.

“Will she whisk you away to her quarters as soon as the song ends?” he poses in your ear. “The Countess is no fool. Who gives a damn about saving face when you’re this beautiful for her, my love? Mm, I can’t wait to show you how much I loved this later.”

The ghostly Asra double plants a peck on your lips and vanishes out of sight, leaving you to your work with that promise coiling in your belly like a pit viper. Coyly, you shield your face from the Countess’ gaze with your veil, shifting your hips until you’re on the elegant tiles again.

Out of the corner of your eye, Ilya appears to push into the crowd to watch you with wide eyes. You acknowledge his presence by bringing your fingertips to the curve of your lips, and gently send it his way. You watch his fingers dig into the ornate fabric of his trousers, watch his eyes follow your body. But it isn’t about him tonight.

Your target is a bigger fish. For the duration of the song you dance for her eyes, and her eyes alone. To express that, you press yourself into the cold tile and drag your body in her direction, craning your torso so that your legs might kick one, two, looking up at her through the long lashes that frame your eyes at her.

For this to work, she has to believe that the two of you are the only ones in the room without the use of magic. You flip onto your back before jumping to your feet in another flip and the crowd cries out with their approval.

The final swell of the chorus, and the song ends with your body contorted in an elegant snake’s pose. You bow with the applause of the crowd, passing your thanks for their attention all around you, and you bow your head one more time before slipping away to collect yourself and catch your breath before mingling with the guests.

The anklets on your feet jingle with the movement as you scurry through the hall past the servants, saying soft thank yous to the ones that stop you to congratulate you.

“Ghania.” She doesn’t raise her voice. It rings through the hallway and you stop, turning to see the Countess in all her finery staring at you from the other end toward the doors to the main hall. “You needn’t be such a wraith to the praise of your audience.”

The Countess walks toward you deliberately slow. You recognize something burning in her eyes. Falsely bashful, you say, “I’ve never been one for the praise.”

“Liar,” she tells you, and you don’t seem to realize the hallway empties out before she’s too close for you to do anything about it. “Save the coquette for the courtiers, sweet thing. You needn’t do it for me.”

Your back presses against the wall. She stands over you, drinking in the sight of you so much smaller than before, letting one languid finger reach out to brush the _dupatta_. “I see the tailor has done wonders. You look magnificent.”

“Nadi,” you tell her. “Shouldn’t you be returning to your guests?”

“No,” she says, almost too casually, extending a hand to you and you know every word of the seemingly wordless invitation. “No, I have other pressing matters to attend to, don’t I?”

More than once Nadia’s expressed a hidden desire to contain the fire of your spirit more than once, to bottle it and keep it on one of her ornate shelves, but tonight is different. She’s starved to even touch you right, seemingly as if you’d vanish into dust the minute she does. Expectation and courtly intrigue, for once, are just background noise for her.

Without a word of reply, you take her hand, and let her guide you to the paradise of finery that made up her bedroom. You’re hit with the smell of incense and perfume floating through her chamber, and before you can even get your bearings she spins you round to pull you flush against her.

The heat from her body seeps through your clothes, and she grabs your face between two fingers and tells you, in her low, smooth voice, “I don’t take kindly to being teased in public.”

“Oh?” You can’t hide the cat’s smile that flashes across your face. “I am not quite sure to what you’re referring, Countess.”

In one swift move, she’s yanked your veil from your head and let it float to your feet. “Do you like to play with fire, Ghania?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Then you’ve made a grave mistake.”

With nothing more she bends down to catch your mouth in such a kiss that every ounce of the sentiment she couldn’t express in the eyes of the court pours into you. You sigh against the hopelessly soft texture of her mouth and let her lift you up and pin you against a nearby wall, unsure of where to rest your hands in her finery.

Instinctually, your hips wrap round her waist. She looks up into your eyes when she asks you, free hand untying the first half of your outfit. “How will I punish such a… brazen display?”

“You didn’t like it?” you ask with a mocking pout.

Nadia’s eyes narrow and she kisses you again, and again, and again, her tongue darting into your mouth, her fingers writing calligraphy into your flushed skin, until you’re dizzy in her arms. “It’s given me ideas about you dancing for me. And only me.”

With a spin she carries you through her chambers and all but tosses you onto the huge expanse of her mattress, one hand trailing up your ankle and across the expanse of your thighs beneath the long, adorned skirt. One or two loose strands of her long hair tickle you as she leans down.

“Unfortunately,” she tuts. “We cannot be too long. I am one of the guests of honor, but there is more than enough time to express my … appreciation.”

Her fingers find the fabric of your smalls and she grins like a cheetah to find it already rather soaked, your head spinning with the adrenaline and the heat of her hands on you. At first it’s simple teasing, but she’s a more impatient woman than she lets on and lets one of her long digits slip inside of you, and you’re so close that you cannot help but look into her eyes.

“We’re on a time crunch, are we not?” you ask, beginning to whimper at how fast she’s already going. “How long will you tease me?”

“For as long as I want,” she replies, and in one swift movement you’ve been pulled to straddle her lap. Nadia leaves hot, open-mouthed kisses on your throat, one finger becoming two, her thumb finding the center of it that she knew would bring you careening to an end before you even started. “Is that not the fun of being Countess?”

And you laugh, despite yourself. “I could withhold the satisfaction from you.”

“You could,” she murmurs. “But that will displease me even more. I want to watch you before returning to my guests.”

At that admission you let out a mewl, frustrated at how adept she is at this, your fingers beginning to dig into the fabric of her dress when she grabs your throat and silently prompts you to start riding her fingers. And with another keen of your hips you oblige, letting her work you into a rhythm all her own.

Small, languid magic of Nadia’s design begins to tickle up your body and swirl round the centers of your breasts and you wonder how in the world she learned this for a moment before your fingers knot into the soft tendrils of her hair, the first wave of the end beginning to herald its arrival in your body.

She kisses your mouth, your throat, the small behind your ear – there is no part of you that is left unravished, untouched. She’d been planning this from the moment you stepped into sight of the crowd and you learn this all too late, made worse by your blatant teasing. And for that she simply brings you rushing to the front door of oblivion.

“ _Close_ ,” you whimper to her, the sensation starting to burn from the tips of your toes to your fingertips. The core of you _cries_ , already so desperate for release. “Fuck, Nadi, _please_ –!”

“I shouldn’t reward you for being such a tease,” she coos in the crook of your neck. “But you’ve done such a good job today… I suppose I can be merciful. Won’t you come for me, Ghania?”

Like a snap of her fingers you come undone in her hand, slick spilling onto her fingers with the impact, rocking your hips into her hands as her fingers guide you through the orgasm, with all the poise that a woman of her station would boast – but you can tell the sight of it is heavenly to her.

Your entire body trembles like a leaf toward the end, and when you float back to earth, you’re tucked into the warm safety of her bosom, and shaking fingers dig into her spiced skin. Nadia’s fingers trace calming circles into your belly. “That is only the beginning. But the night is still young, is it not, sweet thing? How lovely you are when you come for me. So good for me.”

Nadia kisses you long and deep before standing to her feet, leaving you gasping and shaking on her bed, still leveled by the force of your orgasm as she adjusts the hairs out of place, and the fabric that was ruffled.

“You may stay here until you collect yourself,” she tells you in a soft hum, watching you with warmth in her beautiful eyes. You can tell it’s painful for her to part this way, but duty has been drilled into her. “Or you can stay here, naked for me, and wait until the night ends. I would like that very much, but it’s not an obligation. I’m not so selfish that my guests shouldn’t appreciate the splendor of your company.”

“Nadi,” you whine, still aching for her touch. “Please.”

“Wait for me, then,” she tells you with a smile, and slips out of her room, leaving you to pull yourself together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation note bc Asra speaks Arabic in my brain:  
> Ya Allah: Oh, God  
> Amira: My Love  
> Ya Rouhi: My Soul  
> Ya Noor al 3yn: Light of my eyes


	5. Guests Like Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Shameless NSFW ahead, folks. However consider it a part 2 to the festival, as it happening within the same night - and will continue into part three, ft. our good Countess again. I listened to a lot of Solange, m8. Pls enjoy and as always ur purple wife is magnanimous and generous

 

It’s easy enough to slip from Nadia’s quarters without notice, and you feel you’ve adequately put yourself together. There’s a soft jingle with your every step, but the palace is enormous and your mind is still in more of a daze than you could anticipate. The festivities are continuing, and nobody is the wiser to your whereabouts – or probably even cares. It goes to show that drink is always a good way to disappear.

You all but float down the hallway, stopping short of a darker dance floor that was filled with drunken people twining around into themselves, and you make the impulsive decision to dance in the nothingness. It is your ideal state of dance, to just be amongst those who were doing the same.

You stretch your arms into the air and softly gasp when a pair of arms ghost around your waist. You know who your dance partner is but he doesn’t let you turn around, gripping your hips to his and moving you both along to the beat perfectly. Leaning back into Asra, you sigh when his warm hands guide your body to the song that the band croons out, sliding up your waist.

“There you are, Rani,” he coos in your ear. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

He doesn’t say much else than that. He doesn’t need to, guiding your hips to the strumming of the guitar, feeling how you bite into your bottom lip at the feeling of just… surrendering yourself to him. How you can only do this with him.

The singer, in a high pitched lilt, sings about oases and you crane your arms up over his neck and into his hair. Asra groans soft in your ear when you shift and meticulously roll your hips this way and that over his billowing trousers.

You feel one hand slide down your waist and he whimpers in your ear, “I was gonna tease you,” and his breath catches in his throat when he pulls your bodies – somehow – even closer. “But I want you so bad.”

In the pit of your stomach, you feel a longing to clap eyes on your Magician. You haven’t seen him for hours. It’s a squeezing sensation inside of you, and as it manifests you feel his warmth disappear from around your body, and there is an ache from the loss of it.

Like a wraith you follow after him, seeing the familiar puff of cloud hair moving through the crowd and into the long corridors that make up this palace.

Down the hall you go, the soles of your bare feet pounding into the cool stone beneath you, padding after your Magician like you have so many different times, waking and asleep. The lights leading your way seem to morph into one another.

You stop in your tracks to see a figure by the entrance to the library, and you can make out the shape in a heartbeat. Asra smiles, soft and sly and beckons you to him with his finger, opening the door and disappearing into the dark room. A beat pauses where you doubt what you just saw.

A strange urgency seizes you and you go running to the door, pulling it open to find scattered candles lit but it being otherwise empty – and you take soft steps inside, scanning the room.

Did you hallucinate? Gods, the drink isn’t _that_ strong. “Asra?”

“My love?” He steps into sight, and you almost jump. You don’t think much beyond that, crashing into him in what feels like a leap across the distance between you, and sigh into the way his arms close around you. Asra tuts in your ear, smoothing a hand down the back of your head, down the sliding fabric of the veil before tilting your head up so he could look at you.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asks you, with a genuine smile.

You nod. “The Countess liked my performance.”

“Good.”

His smell is an intoxicant all its own for you, and you start kissing into the expanse of his neck, up the elegant swoop to start laying gentle bites into his jawline. A soft chuckle tumbles out of your Magician, and he asks, “What is it, Rani? Mm?”

The interlude with Nadia was lovely, heaven-scented, and deliciously paused – but your mind is elsewhere again, always sent to an isolated planet when it came to the sweep of Asra’s cupid’s bow, to the way he was looking at you during that last performance. Your target forked from his line of sight but he was never far from your mind’s eye.

You crane your neck to look at him properly, silent want plain in your eyes. In his language you say, “ _Qalbi_.”

His lips part at the way your mouth wraps around it before tracing its shape with the pad of his thumb. The two of you tend to drown in each other and this time is no different. He could just starting teasing you but you want him so very badly and you want to, somehow, convey that you don’t want a single fucking game.

And he kisses you, lifts you up and slams you onto a desk, pushing it steady against a nearby wall, so smoothly that in the back of your head you wonder how meticulous his plans were – but he breaks from the kiss and says, hot on your mouth, “Can I be selfish?”

A shiver shoots up your spine at his meaning and you say, “You’re an idiot for even asking me.”

It cracks the tension for a moment and he lets out a breathless laugh, catching your mouth in another kiss. In a flash he’s broken it himself, bringing his lips to your ears.

“I’ve thought about this for hours. Did you know that? I thought about how many times I’ve seen you dance. Since we were children, my love, can you imagine?” As he speaks, his fingers start shifting up the fabric of your skirt, sliding up the length of your thighs. “You are as breathtaking then as you are now.”

“ _Asra_ ,” his name is a whine that tumbles out of your mouth, trying to ease his hands further up your leg. “Please don’t tease m–!” You swallow the word when two fingers probe to see if you’re ready, stretching a bit with a lazy grin on his face at the small yelp you let out in response.

“I wasn’t teasing,” he says, letting his fingers swirl round inside of you for a moment, savoring the way you whimper and roll your hips into his hand.

You grab him by the sheer, black fabric clinging to his torso and grind. Pushing your lower lip out in an obvious pout, you ask him oh so sweetly, “Have I displeased you, Master? Tell me what I should do.”

An sharp intake of his breath is all you really hear before you feel your skirt yanked and tossed into an ignored corner of the room, Asra pulling your hips together in an almost clanging speed. The imprint of his cock behind his trousers is pressing right into your smalls and it is _agony_ , and he grabs your throat with a look on his face that told you all you needed to know about his state of mind.

You let out a shaking sigh, biting into your lower lip when he brings your mouths close, hitching both of your legs around his hips. Practiced fingers dig into the line of your jaw and he leans in, a darkness overtaking his beautiful face.

“Is that how you want it?” Asra grinds his hips along with the question and you buckle. And in your face he says to, “Answer me, Rani.”

“Yes,” you breathe into his ear, legs spreading wider. One hand of your ghosts down over him and you whimper, oh so soft, “You’re so hard.”

“For you,” he says, bruising you with the kiss in response, guiding himself inside of you in one blinding flash of light. Both of you let out a groan at the same time that meant home in a way that was inexpressible in any language, and he let himself sink as far as he could go. Your head cranes back with a whine at the pleasure and he brings his lips to your ear. “Always for you.”

He had you before the festival, he has you during the festival, and he would, inevitably, have you after the festival. Asra moves inside of you like he has a hundred times, and you feel in the way he twines into you that he intends to do it a hundred, hundred times more. You keen into his mouth, letting out cries through the waves that hit you steady.

Asra hisses when you strike a rhythm on him, opening and closing, and a _slap_ resounds through the library when he takes your ass into his right hand and finds a way to pull you closer. Your fingers, in delirium, knot into the soft texture of his hair.

You start to unravel, unwind into bits and pieces in his hands but he knows the symptoms and he slows himself down to a crawl and he purrs in your ear, nails digging into your hips, “You said I could be selfish.”

He snaps his fingers and your anklets plop to the floor, and you laugh in the middle of the fog of agony. “Too much noise?”

“The servants will always be on the lookout for guests like us,” he tells you, kissing into your neck and relishing the sensation of being sunken inside you to the hilt, how you shiver against the length of his body, how your mind swirls with only thoughts of him. “There are _always_ guests like us. I cast a spell on the room, though.”

“You minx,” you tell him, though not surprised in the least. “How long have you planned fucking me tonight?”

“Since this morning,” he replies, picking up speed again, loving the way that you instinctively curl around him to anchor how hard and how fast it’s going. “I could you see you thinking of Nadi… and I thought it would be fun to bring you back to me as best as I could.”

As if on instinct you grab Asra’s face and bring him in for a kiss that you sigh into and you tell him, “As if I ever left, you fucking fool.”

Asra tuts on your bottom lip. “One day I’ll do something about that mouth.”

“Shut me up, then,” you dare him. “ _Master_.”

That time it’s mocking and you see his expression shift right where you need and he grips your throat, thrusting into you harder and faster until you can all but feel your eyes roll into the back of your head at the pressure building in the pit of your belly. Your toes curl, the muscles in your thighs tensing at the white hot _heat_ burning hotter.

“That arrogant little smirk is gone when I have you like this,” he says in your ear, nearly through his teeth. He always knows when you see the end in your mind’s eye, and he always knows what to look for. “I can feel you coiling inside. Ask me for permission, my light. You know the rules.”

And you laugh when you ride him, craning your neck with a mewl when the end you were so intent on it swings into your vision fast and violent. “Fuck your rules.”

He catches you when your body seizes with bliss, twitching and clenching tight on him and he hisses with the pleasure, gasping into a sloppy kiss to your mouth. Both of his hands are on your back as you willfully ride him through your orgasm. You drag your mouth over his face with a breathless kiss once, twice, and he smiles into your hazy attentions. How he loves to watch you float back to earth.

“Naughty,” he murmurs, taking one fistful of your hair. Every nerve of your body tingles with sensitivity and you cry out. “How should I punish you? Hm? I’m sure you have ideas.”

And he bends you over the desk with careful acrobatics that you can’t make out beyond feeling your chest press into the cold wood. Asra lines your hips back up to where he needs them again and you gasp when he sinks back in.

The door clicks open. There’s a pause, the door closes, and a voice asks, “Asra, I do hope you’re not tiring out my court Magician before I even get a chance – in my house, _during_ my party.”

Asra laughs into your flushed body and clamps one hand over your mouth on top of you now, raising his voice above the bookshelf the two of you were obscuring yourself behind in your debauchery. “You’ll have to forgive me, Countess. I’ll bring her to you,” he stops and thrusts into you once, watching your fingernails dig into the wood of the desk with the pot shot of ecstasy. “When I’m done here, shall I?”

Nadia pauses again before she says, “Fine. Do try to bring her to me coherent.” And just like that, the Countess slips away, her scent fading with her.

“How fun,” he murmurs in your ear, both of his hands repositioning you on the desk with rough precision before falling to rest over the curve of your ass for one appreciative moment. “You’ll be thinking about me the whole night, won’t you, my love? It’s a good thing you have stamina.”

Oh, but your mind has already wandered into wicked little corners when you say, “Wait an hour, then come back.”

Asra is still very much inside of you to the hilt and he _grins_ with a cocktail of mischief and delight into your back. “We’ll talk about that after. We’re not done _here_ , Rani.”

He slaps your ass once for good measure, gripping the stinging flesh when you cry out with the sharp pain of it and bringing you oh so blessed close when he adds, “And I’m not going to make this easy for you.”       


	6. A Debauchery Marathon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As I said, this is still shameless NSFW, part three of the festival. Like, pages and pages of it because I never see Asra/MC/Nadia and yanno what I felt like doing the lord's work tonight.

Asra lays your spent carcass onto the chaise in the library, watching you wriggle and shift as you try to get your bearings again through long white eyelashes. Your flushed body is littered with his love bites, dotted across your chest and down in a path to the now-throbbing core of you. Evidence of his own pleasure is spilled lazily all over your chest and you can’t bother to correct your debauched display, still clutching your chest with the heave of your breath.

Your clothes are in a pile near where you lay, save for all the jewelry he painstakingly left on you. You sigh into his fingertips when he traces idle patterns on your body, not even realizing when he walked back over to you.

“Still so wet for me,” he teases soft as cotton down, sheathing two fingers to the knuckles for a moment and you, utterly spent, give him no protest. Asra pulls his two fingers out and shifts his glistening fingers back and forth, a shameless smile on his face. “You’re tempting me not to return you to the Countess at all.”

“You’re both fucking sadists,” you tell him, craning an arm over your eyes for a moment while the pleasure still tingles all over. Gods, you could pass out but somehow the casual hand Asra rests on your thigh is a warm anchor to the waking world. “Passing me around like a party favor. Fuck.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Asra says, and you don’t have to be directly looking at him to know the face he’s making. “You’ve had this dream several times now. Like at least three times, actually.”

You groan because you fucking hate him, tucking over onto your side and onto your belly. All that does is allow him better access to smooth a hand on your ass, in a motion that is calming and arousing all at the same time.

Glaring into the nearest wall you tell him, “The opulence in this castle is an insult to the starving of Vesuvia.”

“Right,” he agrees, laughing at you regardless. “You just danced for the Countess’ court, my love. Perhaps we should focus on one problem at a time, hm?”

“You said you weren’t going to tire me out,” you whine, fingers curling into the plush fabric of the chaise when his hand lazily starts to grip tighter on your ass.

“I’m sure you felt me lying, I was still inside of you when it happened,” he tells you, tilting his head to stare at you with another of his half-lidded, sly smiles. “Look at me, Rani.”

And you do. He’s a picture from where you’re propped up, and in his eyes you can see him contemplating just saying fuck it and eating you right here and now in this library. As if to prod what he wants – and to get him to stop looking at you like that – you say, “Asra.”

“Make sure Nadi doesn’t take all of your strength,” he says, as if relaying a helpful bit of advice. “Because that’s for me. Agreed?”

You feel your toes curl. You know he wants to indulge you with an explanation. “Tell me what you mean.”

Asra laughs in the base of his throat, standing to his feet and grabbing the large veil discarded near the pile of clothes. He drapes it over your naked, shivering body and wraps you up in the ornate cloth, scooping you up into his arms. You stare at the lines of his jaw, and the lovely swoop of his mouth when he says, “Nadi’s going to make it a competition. Which one of us can fuck you better. She’ll probably make me watch her have you. She’s arrogant but…,” and Asra looks down at you as he starts walking, his eyes open pools of desire, “nobody can fuck you like me, can they, my light? It’s funny… I’m not even worried.”

You shudder with the rush of unspoken promises and curl into the warmth of his chest, not gracing his ego with a response.

At your silence, he remarks with a smirk, “I wonder how Nadi will feel when she knows you’ll be thinking of me the entire time. She’s no fool… she’ll catch your mind wandering.”

“Fuck you,” you tell him. “Take me against the wall if you’re talking this game.”

“Patience,” he teases you with a wink, and you feel magic hands pressing into you through the sheer fabric of the veil across your naked body. “It’s no fun if I tell you everything.”

Before you know it, Asra has wrapped two knocks at the ornate double doors of Nadia’s chambers. A beat pauses and he plants a kiss into your hair. The door opens and the Countess is already relatively undressed, still in her fancy underclothes.

One coiffed eyebrow raises at the sight before her and she says, “The firework display is starting soon. Entertain yourself there.”

Like a tomcat he grins and hands you to over to Nadia, and you watch him bow his head. “Of course, Nadi.”

You watch him disappear behind the closing door with a wink from his beautiful eyes and a click.

In one graceful move, Nadia lets you drop to your feet and gestures at a filled, steaming hot bath. You can smell the scented oils from where you stand and you can’t even begin to sniff at such a luxury.

“Want me smelling nice, do you?” you tease.

Nadia watches you intently. “Let me pamper you at least a little for your … stimulating performance this evening, Ghania.”

The prospect of gentle treatment after the library felt like heaven, and with no further argument, you pad over to the large wooden tub and dip one experimental toe before submerging yourself completely. The hot water is a godsend on your aching body and you sigh at the rush of the sensation hugging you.

“Fuck,” you murmur through the bliss, and you hear a contented little laugh behind you. You hear Nadia shift over to you, kneeling just beside the bath with a chair. Dark, amber eyes watch you luxuriate with a gleam of pride.

One, languid fingers starts to trace the lines of your throat, circling round the bites and bruises beginning to pink on your neck. “Asra was rough with you.”

The mention of his name sends a twanging shot between your legs, and you try to focus on _not_ focusing on the promises of later when Nadia is right here, right now. Nadia brings her mouth to pepper feather light kisses on your skin, and you feel her long strands of fragrant hair fall lazily on your half-submerged body. She smells so good and feels so warm and it’s not long before you’re in a hazy bubble of her making.

For a little while, she admires you in silence. There is a pause to catch your breath and she simply traces her digits along the curves and dips of your body, as if trying to memorize it for a blueprint. Nadia’s nose, prominent and beautiful, tucks into the small behind your ear for a moment and drinks in the passing serenity.

Nadia tuts in your ear, two hands slide up your chest to palm both of your breasts, rolling the hardening nubs between meticulous fingertips when she adds, “Such an exquisite creature … I would be too busy showing you how beautiful you are.”

One hand reaches out to bring you in for a tender kiss, and you buckle into the naked adoration she pours into the way her mouth moves. One light gasp when she suckles on your lower lip and she’s telling you, in a gentle command, to stand up.

You do, slowly so as not to splash her, and you intake a slow breath when she offers her hand to help you out of the tub. Your hand slips into Nadia’s and she stands at least several inches above you, a smoldering amusement plain in her eyes.

Dark lashes flit too stare between your legs and Nadia is closer than seconds before, fingertips snaking up your damp thigh. She bends down just enough to ask, “Do you feel more relaxed?”

“What do you think?” you ask her.

Nadia laughs, but doesn’t touch you where you want her to. Instead she gestures her head to the bed and says, “Go on. Back against the bedrest … and legs open for me, sweet thing.”

The Countess doesn’t move, just watches you walk with those orders in mind, and you dutifully pad across the large room. You make a show of crawling into place, feeling theatrical despite the strange state that this entire night has put your mind in.

You feel your back press into the cold silk, and slowly, you swallow an inhale when you spread your thighs in full view of Nadia. One nail is in the corner of her mouth as she watches you and her full lips are parted on it.

Without a word, she puts her hair up and sheds the last layers of her clothes and you just… stare at her as she walks toward you. In a similar vein to Asra, but completely unique in her way, Nadia’s so beautiful you almost become enraged at the sight. If you weren’t starting to come undone by the way she’s already looking at you, her naked body is a blessing.

An exquisite hiss slips out from between Nadia’s teeth when two fingers reach out to touch your dripping cunt. Nadia doesn’t hide her debauched joy at being able to touch you, so exposed to her, and she takes a moment to play between the slick. “No wonder he guards you like a dragon does its treasure hoard.”

“Nadi,” you breathe. “Please.”

“It’s a shame that you’re not always like this,” she bemoans, thumbing your nipple with her free hand for a moment before tracing hands all over the jewelry still on your body. “I would have you in such finery when I fuck you, Ghania. Gold and sapphire to bring out your eyes … looking like a portrait beneath me … mmm. I could keep you in such luxury.”

And despite how much you want her, you tell her, “I won’t be kept.”

“No?” Nadia pouts, rubbing her fingers inside of you again and watching you huff, flushed and squirming. Her fingers plunge deeper when she adds, “All I want is to spoil you, gorgeous creature. Why won’t you let me?”

It doesn’t take Nadia long to find the spot up inside of you that sped up the theatrics to the point of madness, and you start to mindlessly bounce on her fingers as she details everything she wants to do to you in meticulous, deliciously elaborate tandem. Her intentions of worshipping your every inch, wiping your mind of anything but her.

“You would be the most beautiful courtesan in all the world,” Nadia whispers in your ear, forcing you to stare down at her as she fucks you effortlessly with her fingers, before shifting to use her mouth on you instead, and as she bends down she says, “Envied by the world over.”

You lean your head back, teeth gnawing into your lower lip when she buries herself between your legs. One hand reaches out to ball into her hair for leverage and she looks up at you through her lashes, her mouth still on your throbbing cunt, with a wicked smile before her tongue starts swirling in circles through your soaked slit, leaving the briefest sucks on your clit.

Two fingers scissor inside you and you start to buck, releasing the sorts of debauched cries that you only ever recognized on those days where Asra was intent on completely and utterly finishing you.

Your body is already too sensitive. You can’t take much, and your thighs start to squeeze around Nadia’s head and you push into the steady bedrest, her arms snaking out to keep your hips pinned as you rode her hot mouth through the short-lived but exhausting burst of an orgasm.

Nadia sits up, her lips glistening with your slick on her mouth as she watches you flop onto your back and let out a guttural _whine_ at the near-blinding throb between your legs. Your body lands onto the comforter and you struggle to catch your breath.

“If I could bottle that sound,” she begins to say, leaving biting kisses into the prickling flesh of your thighs, satisfied enough with herself. Nadia turns to stare at the door when a knock rips her away.

“Enter,” she says. “Your timing is perfect.”

A shiver creeps up your spine when the door opens because you know what the sound means. Anticipation starts to build in the pit of your stomach when his voice rings out, “I try my best.”

You sit up and lick your lips, as if on instinct. Your having just came a moment ago isn’t lost on him, and Asra tilts his head with a soft, sly smile at the state of you. Your lower lip quivers when he stops just short of touching you and he says, “Have you been good for Nadia?”

Asra’s eyes flash with the promises of before and you’re already throbbing so potently at the thought of being filled up by him – even moreso when thinking about Nadia watching. And he sees where your mind goes with silent acknowledgement.

“I’d say so,” Nadia says from the other side of the bed, watching the Magician’s moves carefully. “Give me another hour and she’ll be better.”

Asra hums, shedding his trousers and his tunic in one fell swoop, and the emerald necklace you’d gifted him hung to his sternum. Still, his eyes stayed fixed on you in this perfect state, your cheeks flushed and your lips puckered and red from hours and hours of sex. One hand reaches out to thumb your bottom lip, and he drinks you in as he spoke to the Countess. “I already gave you more than an hour, Nadi. I’ve come here with entirely selfish designs.”

One hand reaches down to cup your sex and you shamelessly whimper into him, one your knees as he stood just beside you on the bed. And he talks directly to you when he asks, “Shall I show Nadi how I fuck you? Hm?”

“I think that–!”

Asra held a hand out to stop Nadia mid-sentence, and as he speaks he crawls onto the bed to find his way behind you, his arms snaking around your waist to pull him into his lap. His head perches on your shoulder to look at Nadia. “You’re here to learn, Countess. I want you to know how to fuck the love of my life.”

He spreads your knees to bear your cunt to her with one hand, fingers teasing at your entrance, and he brings his lips to your ears and says, “Look at Nadi for me, my light.”

You do. “Asra–!”

“You don’t speak,” he tells you in a quiet command, before returning his attention to the now quite focused Countess, who has decided to sit in an armchair from the bed to get a better view of what would happen. Speaking to Nadia, he says, already playing in the slick between your legs, “Ghania will try to fight you when wetter than the sweetest fruit, that’s lesson number one.”

And you _whine_ into him when practiced fingers find their way and slip inside of you, one becoming two, two becoming three in rapid succession, already stretching you out for him, scissoring your cunt with merciless grace.

Asra’s other hand appears from behind you and roughly kneads your breast in one hand, dragging open-mouthed kisses into your neck as he says, just as calm as before to Nadia, “The key is not letting her charm you into letting her off easy. She’ll be so good for you when you make her fight for it. Isn’t that right, my love?”

The pressure is exquisite but it isn’t enough and you mewl into the crook of his ear, disobeying the order not to talk, almost clawing into him when you say, in the smallest voice, “Please … please … I want you so bad.”

Asra chuckles low in your ear but keeps up his ministrations, as if you hadn’t spoken, when he tells Nadia, “Do you see? Her pretty little mouth begging … it makes you want to fuck her all night. Oh, Countess, I could probably make you blush from the filth that’s come out of this one’s mouth.”

“I’d love to hear it,” Nadia purrs, watching you with one free hand playing between her own legs. There’s a part of you that wants to reach out, to beg to put your mouth on it, but it’s silenced when Asra pushes his fingers further up inside of you.

His name is a benediction on your lips and this must be at least the sixth time you’ve come hard today, and just as the sensation threatens to take you again, thighs trembling with stamina you didn’t know you still had, Asra pulls his fingers out of you and shoves you back down to the comforter.

“You were greedy earlier,” he tells you, his eyes glinting to remind you that he never forgets. “You won’t come until I say.”

The library comes back to your mind’s eye in an impish flash when Nadia, across the room, shifts at the sight of Asra dragging you to the edge of the bed. He sits down, his cock upright with him. It’s what you’ve wanted for hours and you get off the bed and turn to face Nadia, your arousal dripping down your thigh.

With two hands Asra grabs you by the hips and he slides inside of you and the both of you _groan_ with the perfect ecstasy of it, and he shifts only to let you get used to him before he starts to move. Your fingernails dig into his forearm at the sensation of finally, _finally_ being filled to the hilt. So slow at first, but there’s something in the way that you _mewl_ his name …

He grabs your jaw with two fingers and makes you look at Nadia as he fucks you, his pacing picking up agonizingly fast until you can hear the wet sound of the physicality.

Her own two fingers slide between her legs, swirling in slow circles to stimulate herself but not push herself over the edge. Never too soon, not with this sight before her.

“You see, Countess,” Asra tells Nadia as he has you bottom out and let out detached moans with every individual thrust. And he turns his head to look at her, on the brink of her own frustration from where she sat, “This is where they belong, hm? Stretched out around my cock … so good for me, begging flushed with that pretty mouth. Don’t you, Rani?”

You don’t answer. Rather, you can’t say anything even remotely coherent to either of them. And he thrusts into you harder, impossibly deep inside of you, and he demands you answer him. In a near-sob you say, “Yes.”

Dark eyebrows raise and Nadia says, “I didn’t know you begged.”

“It took a while to get to that point, hm?” he coos as he fucks into you. “I see your impatience, Nadi … you’ll get your turn when I’m through.”

“You said that to me earlier,” she points out.

Asra hums, unapologetic as you try to shield the extent of your wanton moaning, whining, and mewling. There’s no dignity in being made to bounce on him. “Rani takes me so good … can’t ever help myself, can I, my love? Tell Nadi how good you feel when I fuck you.”

It’s meant to be humiliating but you’re long past the point of caring about shame in any way, and your mouth opens to just let out a strangled sound close to your Magician’s name. He keeps up a punishing pace and it’s at the point where you feel like you might cry from the building stress coupled with Nadia’s eyes watching your every move.

“Asra,” you start begging him, the world fading around you. “Please … please I can’t take anymore of this.”

“Don’t be rude,” he says to you, grabbing your face and bringing it back to let Nadia look at you again. “Ask for permission.”

Through puckered, pink lips you look at Nadia and you say, “ _Please_.”

She melts, nodding once, staring at you like stolen crown jewels. “Go ahead.”

You throw your head back in an unceremonious cry of relief, shaking as you squeeze around your lover inside of you, feeling him mercilessly pound away, grinding deep and tight with two hands digging into your hips to keep you from moving.

Asra’s own end comes much faster than yours and he holds you in a vice grip so tight you can feel it bruising into your skin, his movements growing more savage. One more strangled noise, low in his throat and you feel his cock twitch inside of you before pumping you full of his hot spend, using and filling you up until the both of you slow to an almost crawl.

Your body feels like dead weight, and you flop onto the ornate mattress and let out an involuntary hiss when Asra pulls out.

You can feel him hot and sticky dripping out from between your legs but if you couldn’t move before, you definitely can’t now. The two of them, Asra and Nadia, are good enough at saving face that they both talk like normal as you attempt to fill your lungs with breath again.

“I do hope you haven’t turned this into a competition, Asra,” Nadia hums, and you can see her hovering in the sweet spot of purgatory as she stands to her feet and crosses the distance to him. Asra is still sat on the edge of the bed when Nadi looks down at him and tilts his chin to look at her even better.

“You say I ought to learn how to fuck the love of your life?” She grabs him by the throat and you see Asra’s eyes blow wider when she pulls him to his feet and all but shoves him to go sit in the same chair Nadia had been sitting and watching you both. “Is the difference what hangs between your legs, Magician? Honestly. It’s child’s play to prove your arrogance has no place here.”

In a moment’s notice Nadia is hovering over you with an impossibly warm look on her face as she reaches down to cup your cheek. “You’ve done so well for me, sweet thing. A performance worthy of all the praise in the world.”

You don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s the soothing tone, or the way that Nadia seems to hook her fingers round the back of your neck to kiss you better and with such open adoration, but when she does kiss you, you find yourself lost. In a voice that even you thought was far off, you nibble on her lower lip and breathe, “Nadi.”

“Any decent Master should know better than to treat you like a toy to be fucked,” Nadia tuts, casting him a withering stare that aims to put him in his place, enough that he shuts up. Nadia stares at Asra through narrow eyes and regards him with a growing sneer. “You won’t speak directly to Ghania until I’ve rewarded her for enduring your barbarism – is that clear?”

What’s clear is Asra not wanting that condition at all, but he swallows the lump forming in his throat and he simply tells Nadia, “Yes.”

Nadia crosses her chamber for a moment and appears again with soothing oils to smooth over your overworked muscles, and you let the Countess pamper you and whisper praise into your ear that only you hear. She lays kisses on the back of your neck, across your shoulder blades, down your forearms. Jasmine and orange blossoms tickle your nose.

“You are the most beautiful thing to grace this court in decades,” she tells you, smiling at the way that you blush in response. You’re too tired for glibness or demure playtime and Nadia has no problem with it. “Your Master is a fool for not worshipping the ground you walk on.”

“Who says that I don’t?” Asra cries from across the room.

Nadia’s face grows colder when she casts her gaze to him. “Did you not just use Ghania like a fuck sleeve? To prove a point, no less?”

“Rani wanted me to,” Asra says with a shark-toothed grin, and he makes sure you’re making eye contact when he asks, “Didn’t you, my love? Had you thinking about when I was going to be inside of you for hours. Go on, tell the Countess the truth.”

“I said you can’t speak to her, Magician,” Nadia’s voice is a steely demand and she watches him to make sure he got the point. It’s rare to see a dominant spirit enough to overtake Asra, but it would be a lie if you weren’t tickled at the sight of it. “If you disobey my direct orders again then I’ll just have you leave, and you won’t see your apprentice for many days. Is that what you want, Asra?”

Asra slumps down in that chair again. “No, Nadi.”

“Good.” Nadia huffs and turns her attention back to you and it almost makes you laugh outright how fast her face softens. “How would you like to be rewarded for putting on such a good show for me?”

And you smile at the Countess and say the truth. “Let me taste you, Nadi.”

Like a cheetah she grins and reclines backward, her legs spreading in full view. You stare between her legs like a treasure hunter, but it doesn’t stop you from casting a glance to your audience in the banishment corner, and as Nadia’s eyes are on the ceiling, you stare him down.

You let a knowing, wicked smile flash across your face at how short she’s been with him. He thinks that this was an assured victory, but you don’t agree, and add to the room, “I want to repay Nadi’s kindness.”

Asra’s eyes flash with the realization of your betrayal.

“Of course you do,” she replies. “Come here, Ghania.”

The gasp that flies out of Nadia when your mouth finds its place between her legs is one you would keep forever. You let your fingers dig into the skin over her belly as you anchor yourself, and you’re already finding her absolutely velveteen with moisture and you gasp with delight into the slickness of it.

You do your job with due diligence and gusto, leaning into the way that her nimble fingers pull on your hair when you get right where she wants you to stay.

“Does my apprentice please you, Countess?” Asra asks from across the room. Even buried in Nadia’s thighs you can tell he’s feeling rather ignored, the irony of which isn’t lost on you, but you’re too busy pulling every noise from her you possibly can.

Nadia whips her hair back with a languid sigh and she replies, “Is it important for you to state your connection to Ghania every other sentence, darling? Are you trying to confess a spot of insecurity?”

“No,” and you can hear the smile in Asra’s reply. “Just commenting on my love’s obvious skill.”

“There it is again,” she teases, casting a glance to Asra. “ _Your_ love? Oh, Magician, you are not as opaque as you pretend.”

The dick waving contest annoying you at this point, you move your hand from fondling at her lovely breasts and press your thumb in tortuous circles just over her clit, your tongue still making a mad dash for the sweet, sweet center. She tastes so good you feel you’d go mad from that alone. Nadia keens into your mouth and starts to move, trying not to overwhelm you but enough to show you that she’s eager to meet her end by your hand.

It’s a reality that makes you move faster, and aware enough of your own anatomy, you make short work of her. It isn’t long before she bucks into your mouth with wordless, sometimes foreign curses tumbling out of the full curve of her lips. Her fingers ball into a tight fist on your head and you _gasp_ , moving fast enough to end her in a flashbang.

Nadia _cries out_ with her end, pulling you in for a rabid kiss. You taste her and yourself on her breath, your fingers still swirling in patterns around her clit as she rides out the orgasm. Like watching art in motion, you’re fixated in the way she looks at you, heaven and light and fire and _wild_ , until she flops back onto the mattress.

While the good Countess floats in oblivion, you notice Asra staring. He doesn’t say a word, still obeying Nadia’s rule of not addressing you directly, and closes the distance between you both. You watch him stop just short of the bed, his eyes flitting at the way your lips glisten with Nadi’s slick. He wants you to make the move first, to move past this invisible wall that Nadia’s set up.

Oh, you know _that_ look.

Your tongue pokes out near a corner of your mouth, the wolfish smile in your victory blatant and mocking him. Staring at you with cold precision, Asra speaks to Nadia when he says, “Nadi… could I have your permission to touch them?”

“You may absolutely not,” Nadia replies, sitting up to glare at Asra. There’s a flush to her dark skin that transfixes you when she points back to the chair in one motion. “Back to your corner, wizard. I’m not done yet.”

You _see_ Asra’s hand ball into a tight fist for a moment before he nods his head once, and you glance at the tenting of the trousers he’d just put back on, and returns to his seat. You bite your lip at the sight of him walking away in such defeat.

In one rush, Nadia’s pinned you to your back with a grin on her face, more than happy to bring your attention careening back to her. “I believe the festivities are still continuing.”

“You’re so beautiful when you come,” you tell Nadia, tracing the shape of her face with your fingertip. “Is there a legal precedent for it? Because _I’m_ at a loss.”

And Nadia responds in a throaty chuckle and pulls you in for a kiss and she replies between kisses, “So you are a silvertongue in more ways than one, sweet thing.”

It is a ravishing that the Countess has done unto you, but it’s so slow and tender that it puts your brain in a different sort of fog than it’s been throughout this entire night. There is naked affection in the way she showers kisses all over your body, how she watches you with such delight as you gasp into the way she touches you, how your fingers like to knot into her hair before you bite into the space behind her ear.

“Nadi…” Asra’s voice is strained, now. And you’re in Nadia’s lap at this point when the both of you look to see him clenching his muscles as he watched the both of you. A wordless scoff and she starts to nibble and suck into your throat, as if he’d never spoken.

Your reaction is instant, as it always is when someone gives such attention to your throat, and you whimper and sigh when you feel her canines starting to worry your supple skin. Nadi cradles the back of your head in one hand as she lays open-mouthed kisses wherever she went.

Asra gnaws on one of his knuckles, watching you being treated so reverently, but he remains silent. The blatant want could have been painted on his beautiful face.

“I must tell you something, Ghania,” Nadia murmurs, and your legs are wrapped quite snug around her hips when your noses touch, and she stares right into your soul with those red eyes. “We haven’t had court dancers for decades, and it is a rather … archaic role, but one that you’re more than welcome to play for me anytime you wish.”

“Would you like that, Nadi?” You ask her.

And she smiles into the crook of your neck when she says, “I would show you how much I like it every evening on a timely hour if you let me.”

Promises, promises, and you let the shiver tickle up your spine, so easily lured into this woman’s personal bubble of adoration. “I’ll consider it.”

“Good,” she hums in your ear, satisfied. Like a cat with a mouse between its claws. And then she asks you, lower, “Shall we keep torturing him?”

“Yes.”

The difference in what happens next is presentation. She doesn’t turn you to face Asra, or throw him debauched faces – she simply slips one finger inside of you, then it’s two, the other on your clit, and begins to work as if he wasn’t there at all. You’re in the Countess’ lap, and it’s clear she wants to watch you front and center and you oblige with all your heart.

Then, Asra in the back of the room asks with far more pronounced need in his melodic voice, “Nadi … please.”

“Hm?” Nadia turns to stare at Asra, but her fingers don’t stop. “Did you say something, Asra?”

“ _Please_ ,” he says again, shamelessly this time. The veins in his arms are visible from how he’s been clenching. “I need you both, I … _please_.”

Nadia stops working you and tucks her nose against your cheek and she asks you, “Shall we let him join us?”

You don’t believe him giving in. Despite that, you say, “I suppose.”

He stands up so fast you have to stifle a laugh, but the look on his face is far from even noticing it. “I need to be able to talk to Ghania.”

“Fine,” Nadia tells him.

With that out of the way, Asra all but jumps onto the mattress and crawls over to you both, extending a hand out to you with an expression on his face that somehow makes your heart hurt _and_ arouse you, simultaneously. Like an automaton you reach your hand out and he tugs you into him, tilting your jaw into a heart-stopping kiss. You melt on contact. He knows he has that effect on you.

The effect is instant, and he deepens it just as fast, and in between the bruising kisses he asks you, “Would you banish me to the corner too, hm? Couldn’t you feel how much I wanted you? How I would explode if I didn’t get to touch you?”

Asra pins you down to the comforter again and he begins his onslaught on your throat and you start to sigh into how warm his skin is and the feeling of his teeth raking across. There is a marked desperation in his movements that stokes you and pleases Nadia.

“Do try to control yourself, Asra,” Nadi tuts, and one hand reaches out to his jaw to bring his gaze to her. “Though I admit seeing you like this is an exquisite sight. Are you not so elated to touch _me_ , then, Magician?”

From your angle below them you see him swallow a lump in his throat and Asra giggles, breathless, and starts to nod his nose toward Nadi for a kiss between them. “I’m a terrible guest if I gave that impression.”

He still tastes you on Nadi’s mouth and the two kiss practiced, deeply, enough to leave you a little entranced at the sight before you. Nadia curls one hand into his white curls and yanks him so his head tilts, and he groans into her mouth and twines his body as she wishes, arms curling around her long neck.

One of your fingers idly finds itself in your mouth, and you watch, the throbbing between your legs growing from an idle annoyance to a dull roar in a matter of minutes.

The two of them stop to see you watching and with a playful smile, Asra brings his lips up to Nadia’s ear to whisper a request. Your curiosity piques, but the Countess nods once and she shifts.

You feel your back press against her chest, cushioned by the lovely, dusky breasts there, her legs situating themselves on either side of you. Asra starts to kiss down your knees, down your thighs, as he spreads you open for him.

Two fingers test you, and he hisses at just _how_ wet you are, and he smiles when he asks, head of his cock just between your legs, “Do you have the energy, my love?”

The pocket of energy. You put the plan together in a flash and, in your mind, you feel you can do them one better with the last of your strength. You let one wave of gentle, forceful magic push him onto his back and Asra flops down with a surprised _oof_ and you crawl over him, asking your own question, “I’m just going to ride you as I please, hm?”

Asra stutters, uncharacteristically, on the surprise and arousal in his response. “I– … _fuck_ , Rani…!” You hear Nadia’s hearty laugh behind you. You grab him with one hand and maintain eye contact with him as you, slowly, slide him inside of you.

Your lips form a little o and you start to ride the feeling of him inside of you, fingernails digging into his chest as you take your fill. Nadia is at your side in a flash with clear pride in her eyes.

“Good,” she tells you, peppering butterfly kisses on your cheeks and into your temple as you maintain a steady rhythm. This isn’t enough to get you to finish and you _squeeze_ yourself around Asra and savor the way he hisses in response. In your ear Nadi commands you to, “Make a mess of him.”

On your thighs you lift yourself up and use the force to slam back down, and he grips your ass with two desperate hands, trying to take control of the tempo to still the madness you can feel brewing in his mind. It isn’t fast enough for him and you grip his throat from where you’re perched and he gasps into your hand. “Fuck. Rani. _Please_ , my love, I just need to–!”

“No,” you tell him, ice cold despite the burn in your cheeks. “Lie still.”

“ _My love_ ,” Nadia mocks him, chuckling and lazily playing with the peaks of your breasts. “Such sweetness when just an hour ago he spoke so vulgarly about your place being on his cock. Do show him that such filthy language won’t be rewarded, treasure.”

In your fingers you let magic slip, heating your touch enough to sting him even more and he lets out a debauched moan, bucking into you as you ride him for all he’s worth. You shift between bouncing on him and outright riding him into the mattress, keeping him suspended at the edge, because you know what you need to do to get him to finish and you won’t do it.

“Tell Nadi what you told me this evening.”

“Oh, I’d love to hear this.”

He balks at the smirk on your face. “Rani…”

You squeeze around him again, stopping dead. “Tell her.”

And he whines, face flushed, cock twitching inside of you, desperate to chase the white rabbit and he says, “I … I said that nobody can fuck you like I can. That I … _nnh_ … that Nadi shouldn’t even try.”

“Arrogance,” Nadi sneers. “Typical. I won’t even grace your ears with my intentions toward your apprentice, mage. Just know that you are more wrong than you realize.”

 _That_ sounded like a bold promise, and you shift your gaze to Nadia for a moment with interest in what she means piqued, who brings you in for a tender, ominous open-mouthed kiss that leaves you distracted. Even more so when she starts to tickle your chest again.

Asra, however, won’t be forgotten, and thrusts once into you with a pitiable whine from his throat. And you stretch your body over him, arching your back so that your faces are levelled. You roll your hips on him and when your mouths are mere centimeters away you say, “Tell me what you want.”

“You know what I want,” he says through his teeth, huffing and clawing at your hips to get you to start moving again. His face is more flushed than you’ve ever seen it. “Please. _Please_.”

Your fingers trace the curve of his cupid’s bow and one hand moves to grip his throat, and you _feel_ his reaction, and you tell him, “Say it.”

“Fuck me,” he whines for you, bucking his hips inside you again. “Please, Rani. Please.”

You finally kiss him then, and start working a fast enough rhythm for him that he really, truly begins to lose his mind beneath you, his fingernails digging into the soft flesh of your back as you kept a steady, punishing pace of your hips.

All the while you make a point of moaning into his mouth just the way he likes and he grips your ass all the harder as the two of you begin to hammer away until you’re lost in each other, as you do in these moments, breath intermingling and magic sparking to such heights that it feels like you’re drunk on nothing at all but spinning all the same.

It happens that the two of you come at the same time and he catches your mouth in a kiss to mask the desperate way that he pumps into you toward the last of his wave.

And you slump on top of him and that’s the last of your energy for the evening.


End file.
